


through

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-09
Updated: 2010-09-09
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:09:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 49,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/113745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jennifer and Teyla are captured by the Wraith while on an away mission—and for the Queen who catches them, there is greater sport in making Jennifer prey, and Teyla her only hope of survival, than in making Teyla run alone. Left to run on a seemingly uninhabited planet, Jennifer and Teyla must find each other if they want to outrun the Wraith—and unravel all the surprises this world has in store for them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	through

**Author's Note:**

> [Art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/119418) by [mapsandlegends](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mapsandlegends/pseuds/mapsandlegends)
> 
> My grateful thanks to the team of betas who wrangled this into something approximating a story: Crysothemis, Friendshipper, and Trinityofone. Without their patient hard work, this would make a lot less sense and contain a lot more mangled syntax. I must also thank Sheafrotherdon and Dogeared for their tireless cheerleading and for their help with brainstorming. ♥!

Colonel Sheppard wasn't one for setting a fast pace—the man seemed content to amble along he trail with his hands resting loosely on the butt of his P90, his teeth working on the end of a stalk of browning grass—but by the time they reached the main settlement, Jennifer's shirt was still stuck to her back with sweat. In some ways, Naiburat wasn't that different from central Wisconsin—the countryside spread out around their group in long stretches of open, level grassland, broken here and there by rolling hills—but the heat was more than even a Midwestern childhood had taught Jennifer to tolerate; the air was dry enough to make her think of the Southwest, of red rock and the taste of dust on her lips. As she walked, she talked with Marie about some new procedures they were planning on implementing in the infirmary, and let her gaze wander to the horzion. Every now and then, she entertained the idle fantasy that on the other side of the sunset was Chippewa Falls, but it was never one she could keep up for long—no summer sky in Wisconsin had ever held the faint lavender cast of a Naiburatu noon, and no July there had ever been accompanied by the strident soundtrack of the Colonel and Rodney bickering about whether a fantasy football team could legally include people who played _k'thonis_ professionally.

"There's a ball!" Rodney protested as they came up over the final rise before the town proper. "You pick it up! It's hardly that different from football as Americans play it. And I think the similarity in skill set—"

"Trust you to take the _fantasy_ part too seriously, McKay," Sheppard drawled. "You know—"

Whatever the Colonel said after that was lost in the noise and clamour of their arrival. The Naiburatu were an exuberant people—_to make a friend of the Naiburatu is to make a friend for life_, Teyla had said dryly before their first visit to this planet, and Jennifer could certainly understand that now. Each of the visitors from Atlantis was exclaimed over in turn by the twelve-strong welcoming committee—the Doctor McKay looked in flourishing health; the Colonel Sheppard seemed in good spirits; had the Specialist Dex grown even more? He was like a young tree! The Speaker Emmagan looked more like her dear mother every time they saw her; the Doctor Keller's smile was lovelier than ever; the Nurse Yee, such a joy to see her again; and they have brought friends, so lovely!—their hands were shaken with enthusiasm as cold drinks were pressed upon them.

The others were left to enjoy their refreshments in the shade of a brightly striped awning. Jennifer would have preferred to stay sitting beside Teyla, but instead she, Marie, and the rest of the medical personnel were ushered into the building that served as a hospital for the town and its hinterland. Like most other Naiburatu buildings, only a low hillock, covered with dried-out grass and pock-marked with small round windows, revealed its location—almost all of the structure was below-ground. The large room to which Jennifer and the others were led lay at the bottom of four twisting flights of stairs. There they were met with another enthusiastic welcome, though this time by by people with whom Jennifer was more familiar—several Naiburatu medics with whom she'd worked last time she was here, all of whom were eager to divest her and Marie of the stocks of antibiotics which they'd brought with them, and even more eager to share the progress they'd made in treating the yellow pox.

"I think you'll be pleased," Dr Acrifa said. Her dark eyes crinkled up at the edges with the force of her smile as she handed Jennifer a sheaf of notes. "The medicines have been very successful at lowering temperatures and reducing the risk of complication. There are still one or two patients that I'm a little worried about, but they did have prior health conditions which would explain their slower recovery. Overall, the improvements have been remarkable."

"I'm so glad to hear it," Jennifer said, returning Acrifa's smile. She and Marie paged through the notes, which thankfully were written in a dialect of Ancient that they could both puzzle their way through. It seemed that the antibiotics had done exactly what they were supposed to do: turn a highly infectious disease with serious lung complications into something hardly worse than common-or-garden flu back on Earth. It was what she had expected, but to have confirmation still sent a little spark of happiness through her—was this what it had been like, Jennifer wondered, for the researchers who had conducted the first clinical trials of penicillin, who had first known the possibility of curing so many diseases? Especially since the Naiburatu would have all the benefits of hard-won Earth knowledge to add to their own store of wisdom—no MRSA would develop here, not if she had anything to do with it.

"Have you had any patients experience side effects?" Marie asked.

"Mild to moderate nausea in three cases only," Acrifa said, leading Jennifer and Marie on an inspection of the main ward. The last time Jennifer had been here, the ward had looked very different—gaunt, wheezing patients lying very still under the sheets. Now, most were sitting up, and judging by the number of empty beds, some must even have been discharged already. "Though of course, we're still monitoring for any signs of further complications. But it all seems to have been a great success—has certainly silenced the sceptics. The Council are all very pleased, and I've been told on the quiet by one of the members that they're going to recommend we permanently ratify the treaty."

"Really? That's—that's wonderful!" Jennifer could feel her cheeks heat, in that old, embarrassing response to unexpected good news—and this _was_ good news, this was something they could bring to the IOC to say _See, we were right_, something that would help both to make Mr Woolsey's tenure more secure, and help Jennifer and Teyla to leverage more concessions from him in the future about the trade of medical knowledge and technology. She exchanged a brief, delighted grin with Marie, who'd worked just as hard on this as she had, who'd put in just as many extra hours, downed just as much bad coffee while drafting and redrafting proposals for the IOC in an attempt to find just the right jargon-filled way to tell them that they were being short-sighted idiots.

"When do you think they'll make a decision?" Marie asked, stowing the paperwork in her backpack for further review once they returned to Atlantis.

"The Quaestor Utsira should be signing the ratification papers with the Colonel Sheppard and the Speaker Emmagan any minute now," Acrifa said, jabbing her thumb upwards in the direction of the ceiling. "The officials take care of all the boring things—trade and training agreements and percentages—but we know we'll be able to work together, and that's the important thing." She ushered Jennifer and Marie over to a room where a lab had been set up, its equipment an odd-looking mixture of Naiburatu, Earth and Ancient technology. "Just don't tell Utsira I said diplomacy was boring; I would be disowned."

"Just make sure you don't say that to _Teyla_," Jennifer said with a half-laugh. "Last time Rodney did that, I think getting hit with sticks was the least of his worries!"

Acrifa looked from Jennifer to Marie and back again. She pushed her half-moon glasses back up her nose. "The Speaker Emmagan didn't seem like a _violent_—"

"Oh no!" Marie shook her head vigourously. "No, it's just—she has this thing she does with her eyebrows. Makes me think of my fourth grade teacher."

That didn't seem to go down any better. "It can be pretty scary?" Jennifer offered. Not that Jennifer truly thought of Teyla as scary—well, perhaps a little, right after their time on New Athos, when Teyla had been so implacably, fiercely focused on recovering her people—but losing the respect of Teyla Emmagan was probably never a good idea. It wasn't something Jennifer ever wanted to do.

Acrifa nodded slowly at them, with a careful look on her fact to which Jennifer had grown quite accustomed since she'd started going off-world—a look that said _you're nice people, of course, but there's something not quite right with your heads_. "I understand," she said with enunciated care, and then, in a clear attempt to change the subject, tugged her tunic straight and said, "Would you like to see some of the specimen slides we've been working on? One of my cousins has a factory in Gabanthe—that's a day's travel to the east of here—and there are already quite a few techs living around there. She's going to start manufacturing some for us on a trial basis. If they can work to our specifications, we won't have to rely on Atlantis so heavily any more for such basic supplies."

Jennifer exchanged a delighted look with Marie—if the Naiburatu could source medical supplies here, then maybe one day Atlantis would be able to do so, as well. Their own supply chain was pretty tenuous, the Daedalus an infrequent visitor; Jennifer had often overheard the Colonel and Teyla discussing alternative supply sources and worst case scenarios. "We'd love to!" Marie said. "Have you considered—"

But the rest of her question was lost, swallowed up by the noise. Overhead, someone was screaming.

**********

Teyla had conducted many negotiations since she had become a leader of the Athosians, and almost as many more since she had become part of John's team (partly, she suspected, because where on Athos she had been one of several who could speak comfortably for her people, where her team was concerned, she was often the only one who could or would speak with facility). This was one of the more pleasant ones—conducted in the open air, seated on comfortable chairs under the shade of a broad awning, with good company—and it was to be hoped that the conclusion would be equally as pleasant. Within the medical facility, with any luck, Jennifer and Marie were verifying the success of the drug trials, and despite all of John and Ronon's caution, Teyla had seen no sign that the Naiburatu were treating them with anything other than complete candour. The change was refreshing. She sipped at her mitahn juice and followed along as Utsira read out the document—most of it was familiar to her from the long hours she and Mr Woolsey had spent drafting it, but there were some additions that required her attention.

"Do you think you will be able to attract support from the other settlements for this?" she asked Utsira when they had finished discussing the last section. "There have been planets who have declined to form alliances or trade agreements with us before now. We do not wish to create undue conflict amongst your people."

"All the cities that've responded so far have voted yes," Utsira said, leaning back in her seat. Her alert posture and the high slant of her cheekbones made her seem even more regal than usual. "Only two still have to reply, and I don't think they will be any different. Trade has been sluggish for the past few years, since Pmoc was culled, and the chance at new markets, coupled with the training you're offering… I won't say there's been no scepticism. I won't say _I'm_ not still a little sceptical. But we're willing to take the risk."

John opened his mouth to speak, but Teyla quelled him with a look. "As we are willing to trust you," she said smoothly. "I believe an alliance can only be favourable for both our peoples."

"An end to the pox," Utsira said, with a grim kind of humour, "can only ever be a good thing." She gestured at the open box which contained several of the long, thin styluses with which the Naiburatu wrote. "And now to the formalities—who among you is empowered to give the first signature?"

Teyla gestured at John, prepared to say that he was highest in the chain of command which Mr Woolsey had been so adamant about formalising, but then froze. There was a familiar, terrible itch running down to the base of her spine, making her fingers curl, and she stood and walked out from beneath the awning to stare up at the sky. It was a clear, bright blue, with only the barest hints of cloud limning the horizon, but Teyla felt her blood run cold. Behind her, she felt Ronon stand, heard the faint whine of his gun powering up. "Teyla?"

"Rodney," she said without taking her gaze from the sky. "Do you have your scanner with you?"

"What? Why?" Rodney said, but Teyla could hear the rip of velcro as he pulled his tablet computer off his back and booted it up. "Why am—shit. _Shit_. There's a hive ship in orbit, looks like multiple darts heading right for us." Fear coiled low and sick in the pit of Teyla's stomach. She could feel them. They were coming.

"Wraith?" Utsira said, jumping to her feet, all thoughts of the treaty clearly forgotten. In the straight set of her spine and the curl of her fists, Teyla could see how great a soldier the woman must have been before the arthritis had slowed her steps and cramped her hands. "Coming here? How can you tell, Speaker?"

"How long've we got, McKay?" John was checking the ammunition in his P90, double-checking his supply of hand grenades.

"On their current angle of trajectory? Three, four minutes." Rodney's fingers moved rapidly over the computer's screen. "I count five, maybe six—there's interference in the mesosphere that—"

Utsira cut him off. "I have to sound the alarm. Get to a bunker as soon as you can, follow the others." She favoured them with no more than a cursory nod before picking up her long green skirts and running at full speed across the courtyard to the council chambers, though Teyla knew that even the most careful of steps caused Utsira great pain. She was in the building barely a moment before a low, wailing alarm rang out across the town, and all the the Naiburatu who weren't already below ground, away from the heaviest of the afternoon heat, ran for the nearest doorways. Most were efficient, long practised at this kind of flight, but one man was being supported by two neighbours. They carried him quickly but with care out of his small kitchen garden and down into the infirmary building where Jennifer was—his hands were stained darker with soil, but his gaze was fixed on the sky, his throat surely already raw with the force of his terrible screams, though the placid blue of the sky still held no visible danger. A survivor of a prior culling, Teyla guessed, loading a full clip into her P90. She had seen reactions like that before.

"Three each, buddy, what do you think?" John drawled at Ronon, the sly, half-grin of his mouth at odds with the tension around his eyes.

"Five for me, one for you," Ronon shot back.

"No," Rodney said, "no, absolutely not, there will be no acting like testosterone-fuelled idiots today, not when we know that there's a nice safe bunker a few yards away just waiting for us." He flapped his hands at them. "Go on, shoo, go, mush, when I say those darts will be here in a minute, I mean _literally_ a minute."

"Okay," John said, grin slipping off his face, his jaw setting. He scanned the town square to make sure that no one was left behind, but the Naiburatu were well-organised and the population scarcely larger than Athos' had been before the great culling that had taken Teyla's father—even the stragglers were already disappearing below ground. "Let's go, guys, nearest bunker."

"I am so not paid enough for this," Rodney grumbled as they trotted across the square, wary eyes on the sky above them. There was still no sign of the Wraith, but Teyla knew that they had to be close—the skin between her shoulder blades itched and prickled, and she felt chilled to the bone despite the sun still beaming down on them. She felt the sudden sense memory of running from cullings as a child—how afraid she'd been, even before she'd truly understood what the word _Wraith_ meant; how disorienting it had been to feel her body shriek at her for reasons past her comprehension—and was doubly glad for the relative safety afforded by the Naiburatu bunkers. Unless this proved to be anything more than a smash and grab raid, they would at least have some level of protection—and if it was indeed more than a quick raid, well, Teyla was ready for a fight.

"Shut it, McKay," Ronon said, stooping to avoid hitting his head as he followed Rodney into the bunker.

Overhead, Teyla could hear the first faint whines of the darts entering the lower atmosphere. Teyla took a steadying breath, hoping that the tunnels would provide enough shielding between them and the culling beams, and was about to follow John through the bunker doorway when she heard the familiar crackle of a comm channel opening up in her right ear.

"Teyla?" It was Jennifer—sounding concerned, but not as concerned as she should be. In the background, Teyla could hear a worried babble of voices and the clatter of footsteps on tile. "They just brought a man down here who doesn't seem so—he seems very… upset? All the people who brought him in know is that the town alarm has gone off, but they don't know what kind of emergency is it. Marie's assessing him now; I'm on my way up with a medical kit. Is it another tornado—"

Teyla whirled around, tapping at her own comm. "Jennifer, no, stay below," she snapped, but across the square, the hatchway that led down to the infirmary was opening and Jennifer was clambering out, weighed down with the medical pack she was carrying.

"What's—oh god," Teyla heard Jennifer breathe low in her ear, and then the darts were swooping in low over the village, engines screaming and the wind of their passage kicking up reddish dust, making Teyla's hair tangle around her face.

"Get inside!" Teyla yelled at Jennifer, narrowing her eyes against the grit in the air. "Get inside and stay there!"

Jennifer immediately dropped her pack in the dirt and turned to run back for the entrance, but bare seconds before she got there, someone slammed the hatchway closed. For a moment, Teyla was as stunned as Jennifer was, but then she heard Jennifer curse, sharp and terrified, and kick at the door. "Let me in! Let me in, _please_!"

There was no time—whichever terrified Naiburatu had closed the door clearly wouldn't be persuaded to open it any time soon. Teyla glanced back over her shoulder, and saw one of the darts banking and turning low, a couple of miles beyond the village—she had the horrible premonition that it had spotted the two of them, standing like stunned prey out in the open. She could feel the echo of its hunger; it turned her stomach. "Jennifer! Over here, run!" she yelled. "Run!"

Jennifer was fast over the open ground, with a burst of panicked speed that was surely the product of all the time she had spent training with Ronon—but it wasn't fast enough. The light of the beam was bright enough to temporarily blind Teyla. She took an involuntary step backwards, stumbling as Jennifer vanished in the moment between one heartbeat and the next.

Behind her, Teyla heard someone yell out her own name, but it was hard to hear over the scream of the dart's engines, the pounding of her blood in her ears—and then the light took her, too.

**********

Jennifer came to slowly. Her head felt heavy, her thoughts sluggish as she tried to remember where she was and what had happened. All her joints ached, and just sitting up made something crack suspiciously in her back. She rubbed gingerly at her wrists as she looked around. She was in a small, confined space—dim enough that she had to blink several times to make her eyes adjust to the lack of light; humid enough that she began to sweat straight away. The air tasted like salt and old copper—like a hive ship. She was on a _hive ship_, her aches and pains were the well documented side effects of being caught up in a culling beam, and the realisation made her heart hammer in her chest.

"Shit," she hissed under her breath and struggled to her feet. She could try to escape, but even if she got out of this room, what could she do? Jennifer knew she wouldn't be able to pilot a dart off the hive ship, like the Colonel would, or disable the hive's navigational systems like Rodney, or even blow them all to kingdom come like Ronon. She was only good for—

"You are awake?"

The shock of realising she was not alone was enough to make Jennifer sit back down suddenly, though the floor—uncomfortably organic in ways Jennifer didn't really want to think about—was yielding enough not to bruise. "Teyla? What are you doing here?" She focused on the direction from which Teyla's voice had come, and saw her sitting by the small opening that looked out onto a poorly lit corridor. It seemed as if they'd been put into less a holding cell and more a crawl space; the room was low enough that Jennifer had to stoop as she made her way over to Teyla.

Teyla's eyebrows arched upwards. She looked tired and drawn, her eyes ringed with circles so dark that it looked as if she'd been punched; the light in her eyes that had grown so familiar to Jennifer was tamped down, dull. Jennifer realised what she'd said and suppressed a wince at her own stupidity—if Teyla was here, it was for the same reason that Jennifer was. In fact, it was probably because she'd tried to _help_ Jennifer—if Jennifer hadn't tried to come out of the infirmary, would either of them be here? She wasn't tired, Jennifer realised, stomach churning—Teyla was probably angry with her, pissed as all hell, and Jennifer couldn't blame her. Trust her to go and get someone killed, when her job was supposed to be saving lives.

"I would imagine much the same as you are—waiting," Teyla said dryly.

"Waiting?" Jennifer swallowed, because she couldn't imagine that they were waiting for anything _good_. "Why are we waiting? Why haven't they just… You know…" She held up the palm of her hand at Teyla, even while trying not to think about the weight of a Wraith's hand pressed against her chest.

"I do not know," Teyla said. She was hugging her knees to her chest, craning her neck to look as far down the corridor as she could. Jennifer didn't know if she should be relieved at the fact that Teyla didn't seem immediately angry—just distant, preoccupied. "I believe we were the only ones taken—I have not seen or heard anyone else. But I do not know why they are keeping us like this. Normally the Wraith feed immediately, or keep their food in storage."

_Food_. Jennifer scooted a little closer to Teyla, still feeling pathetically grateful that at least she wasn't here by herself, and horrendously guilty about that gratitude. Teyla might die because Jennifer had tried to be brave and rush to help without stopping to think; Teyla's presence here meant that she was not where she belonged, back on Atlantis with her son. Oh god, Torren; Jennifer closed her eyes and thought of his small, cheerful face and felt her mouth go dry with guilt. "Do you think the others will be able to find us? Rodney's done it before, right, tracked down hive ships?"

"Presuming that they did not jump straight into hyperspace once they realised that the culling would be unsuccessful? Perhaps." Teyla leaned her head back against the wall. In the half-light, her skin took on a sickly greyish tinge; her mouth was pinched and drawn. She looked much older than she truly was.

"Are you feeling okay?" Jennifer had lost all of her medical equipment, but she could still roughly gauge temperature with the back of her hand—and Teyla's forehead was alarmingly warm.

"There is a Queen on this ship," Teyla said. She didn't meet Jennifer's eyes; her gaze was directed somewhere else, turned inwards. "I can sense her—she is very old, and strong. She is moving closer, and she is angry. It is very hard to keep her out." Teyla's throat worked as she swallowed convulsively; beads of sweat stood out on her face.

"What can—" Jennifer let her words trail off as she heard footsteps approaching. The heavy, unhurried tread promised no rescue, and she was unsurprised to see two drones and a male Wraith coming towards them down the hallway. The Wraith led them out of the room, but neither attacked them nor spoke, just herded them down a series of long, curving corridors.

Jennifer had no idea what direction they were heading in, or why they were heading there in silence. She'd not exactly spent much time practising escaping from a hive ship—the experience of having had one grow out of her gut notwithstanding—and regardless of the schematics she'd studied, she was hopelessly disoriented. Teyla didn't seem inclined to ask the Wraith any questions, and Jennifer figured that it was best to follow her lead—it wasn't like either of them could make a break for it right now anyway. There was nowhere to run to in these close, narrow corridors which reminded Jennifer uncomfortably of arteries—the walls around them pink-grey and pulsing, studded here and there with what looked like feeding pods. The air was humid and thick with the smell of blood-copper. Sometimes Jennifer felt as if she spent most working days up to her elbows in her colleagues' guts, so she wasn't exactly unaccustomed to the smell, but she still almost gagged on how _wrong_ this place felt—on how this charnel house was overwhelming her with the sense memory of her time as a hive seed, when her body had felt besieged and liberated all at once.

Jennifer shivered. She didn't like to think about that.

Eventually, the corridor widened out and opened onto a round, low-roofed room. It was cooler here than in the rest of the ship, and the drop in temperature would have been a welcome relief if it weren't for the Wraith Queen sitting straight-backed on a chair at the far end of the room, her blue-grey hair falling long and waterfall-smooth over her shoulders.

The drones pushed Jennifer and Teyla forward to stand in front of her, and then stepped backwards until they were blocking the only exit that Jennifer could see. She resisted the impulse to hide behind Teyla, especially when the Queen leaned in towards them, nostrils flaring as if catching their scent.

"So you're the little imposter," she said to Teyla. "The human who dares to claim to be one of us. My sisters have told me much about you. I was expecting something more… impressive, given all the trouble you have caused them." The slippery fabric of her dress coiled around the Queen's ankles as she stood, her long limbs unfolding in a way that reminded Jennifer of a crane fly—all deliberate motion and too many joints. Faintly, Jennifer was proud of herself for not leaning away or taking a step back; she concentrated on keeping her breathing steady and held her ground. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Teyla slowly clench her fists.

"And yet," the Queen continued, "I have captured you with hardly any effort all. Disappointing. I was expecting more of a challenge when I finally encountered the infamous little Teyla." She stepped down from the low dais and walked around them, eyeing them as a farmer would evaluate livestock. That was a train of thought that didn't bear much thinking about. Jennifer kept her gaze fixed on the far wall of the room, trying not to think about listening to her father talk to the neighbours, calmly comparing price-per-pound and judging the plumpness of a particular sow while the animals were being driven in from the fields to the slaughter. "And I was hoping for some entertainment."

Teyla's expression was stony. "I am afraid you will have to rely on your own taste for melodrama," she said, words clipped with anger.

The Queen hissed softly, and Jennifer hoped like hell that that wasn't the Wraith equivalent of laughter.

"Bravado! _That_ is entertaining—and how much more so it will be to break you," the Queen said. She used the tip of one cruelly sharpened fingernail to raise up Teyla's chin, to force Teyla to meet her gaze. Jennifer made an abortive, instinctive attempt to step forward and intercede, but it took only a quick flick of the Queen's hand to force her backwards. "I could make you kneel at my feet and beg to worship me."

"I would rather die," Teyla bit out.

"It is interesting," the Queen said, "how very often humans say that to me, when I can think of so many things worse for you than a quick death." She nodded at the drones, and one of them came forward and took Jennifer by the arm.

"Leave her alone," Teyla said, jerking her face away from the Queen's grasp. "I am the one you want to—"

"So quick to assume you will be left out of the fun," the Queen said, and she bared her teeth in a horrible parody of a human smile. Jennifer tried her best not to shudder, but must have failed—the drone's grip tightened on her, surely forceful enough by now to be leaving a ring of bruises around her bicep. "Come and see what I have planned, little Teyla. Your arrival has given me the inspiration for a game."

The two drones quick-marched Teyla and Jennifer down a corridor behind the Queen, whose blue-grey hair flowed out behind her like a battle standard. The room to which she took them lay at the bottom of a sloping corridor that led away from the throne room—away also, Jennifer thought, from the room where she and Teyla had been kept. It was a spare, echoing space—but there was something that looked like an operating table in the middle of the room, and there were straps, and there was a single male Wraith standing there with what looked like a scalpel in his left hand.

"Oh, that is not good," Jennifer breathed to herself. The Wraith gestured, and the drone leading Jennifer tugged her forward towards the table. "Oh, god." She felt her knees start to give out, and then the drone picked her up as if she was nothing at all and put her down prone.

Distantly, Jennifer noted the effects of increased adrenaline production on her body—her increased heart rate, the shaking in the long muscles of her legs and arms, the dull roaring in her ears that stopped her from making out anything that Teyla was saying beyond the urgency of her words. She tried to struggle, but it didn't help.

The blade was very sharp.

*********

She made Teyla watch while the Wraith technician worked—the Queen's grip on the nape of Teyla's neck was tight enough to remind Teyla with every breath that the Queen could snap her neck with little more than a thought, and Teyla felt she owed it to Jennifer not to look away, to honour her courage. There was no anaesthetic, no painkillers, and almost worse than Jennifer's choking scream at the first slice of the scalpel were the whimpers she was making by the end, as the Wraith stitched her flesh closed over white bone and blood-spattered metal. Her hair fell loose and tangled over her face, so that Teyla couldn't see her expression; perhaps that was for the best. Teyla needed nothing else to fuel her anger, required no further stimulus to want the Queen and all her subjects lying dead at her feet, and certainly at this moment Jennifer had no need to see the pity and the pain writ large on Teyla's own face.

"It is already activated," the Wraith said when he put down the needle. "The game can start whenever you wish, my Queen."

The Queen let go of Teyla, stooping to inspect the technician's handiwork. Teyla took advantage of the Queen's momentary distraction to try to catch her breath; being this close to a Queen was never without its challenges, both mental and physical, and any chance to reinforce her barriers against casual presumptions and pointed invasions was welcome. Whatever the Queen saw pleased her, however, and the wave of pleasure she sent out made the bile rise in Teyla's gorge even with newly strengthened defences. On the bench, Jennifer moaned softly.

Teyla pulled herself up to her fullest height. "If you think you will gain anything from making us Runners—"

The Queen turned her head just enough to look at Teyla from beneath the fall of her hair. "Who said anything about a plural, little Teyla? I am a Queen—I rule as my mothers ruled before me, and if I wish, I can change the rules of the game." She gestured with one hand, and from the shadows, two Wraith drones stepped forward and hauled Jennifer off the bench. Jennifer was conscious enough to be able to sluggishly tug her bloodstained t-shirt back down over her belly, but she was flushed, and her head rolled on her neck as if it required too much energy on her part to hold it up. "We will track your companion here—for whatever sport such a weakling will give us—but so will you. I have heard reports of what a good little hunter you are."

"I will never serve you," Teyla spat, anger warring with fear within her. Even if the Wraith could not force her to hunt down Jennifer, Teyla knew that Jennifer did not have the skills required to evade a Wraith bent on feeding. Whatever Jennifer had learned from Ronon over the past few months, even his instruction could not have been enough to overcome both history and inclination—Ronon had only survived seven years, longer than any other Runner they had ever encountered, because he was one of the best hunters, the best athletes, Teyla had ever known. Jennifer would Run to her death because a Wraith wanted to gain amusement from Teyla's pain; Teyla would accept responsibility for Jennifer's well being when they had been cast into this situation together, but she rejected the possibility of being guilty of her death. "You can kill me now, because I will never help a Wraith track anyone."

"And again you hurry to speak in ignorance," the Queen said. "It is very boring—I do not know why my sisters found you such a challenge." The indifference in her voice was enough to make Teyla's blood boil; few things were so calculated to chip away at her self control as being considered unintelligent, or her people unimportant. It had been one of the biggest impediments for her to overcome during the negotiations with the IOC about trade and non-aggression pacts between Earth and this galaxy—she had been trained to diplomacy between people who thought of the Athosians as their equals, not as exotic primitives, and only many bottles of beer provided by John, and several no-holds-barred sparring sessions with Ronon, had been able to get her through those weeks. "When did I say that you would be hunting _with_ one of mine? We shall set the three of you down—you and this one and the best of my hunters—at three separate spots. It shall be a race—shall little Teyla or one of the People find this thing first?"

"And I suppose if I win you will let us both go?" Teyla said, the edges of her words curling with scepticism and disdain.

The Queen hissed, long and low, a sound that spoke to all the hidden, dark places inside Teyla—the places that even now, she could not stomach referring to as _Wraith_, the places inside her that wanted to respond to such laughter with pure challenge. "Of course not—but you will be able to reward her with a swifter death than any which I will visit on her. Consider that incentive enough to make you run."

"I will see you dead," Teyla told her, forming her words with great precision, throwing the force of her emotion through the link that existed between her and the Queen, hoping that some part of the Queen would recognise how truly serious she was, how determined. She had survived Michael's assaults and the loss of Athos; the corruption of her body with the Wraith enzyme and the grief of losing so many dear friends. There had been so many challenges and she had come through them all; in comparison, this Queen was nothing. "I will grind your bones into _dust_."

The Queen bared her teeth. "Perhaps, little Teyla. But you will run first."

*********

Jennifer felt light-headed. She couldn't remember ever feeling pain like this before. The aftermath of having her wisdom teeth out had been blessedly numbed with prescription painkillers; when she'd fractured an ulna as a child, tumbling off her bike, she'd had her father there to tell her it would be okay and hurry her to hospital. Even when she'd had a hive ship sprouting from her belly, it hadn't been like this—then she'd been numbed, lulled by the sedatives the ship had sent through her veins as bit by bit it sent her to sleep, cannibalising her body to make her its catalyst for growth. This time, though, she'd felt every inch of her flesh light up with pain as the scalpel cut into her, as the Wraith doctor had cut down to the bone. When she'd heard the blade scrape against a vertebra, she'd held herself as still as she could, not daring even to scream—one slip of the knife and she knew she was paralysed or dead.

It wasn't as if she didn't know anything about the process. Jennifer had read all of Carson's carefully annotated reports; had half-a-dozen awkward non-conversations with Ronon; examined the various types of trackers which had been removed from Ronon's back and from the backs of the other Runners whom the expedition had encountered over the years. She'd understood that it had to be painful, but there was nothing in the bland, sanitised text that conveyed how much it _hurt_ to have something so forcefully wedged up against muscle and bone—some small, hysterical voice at the back of her mind told her that next time she saw Ronon, she owed him a beer or a hug or something.

By the time the Wraith was stitching her up, with sloppy jabs of the needle that she knew would leave jagged scars, Jennifer had turned her head to dig her teeth into the soft flesh of her upper arm, seeking some distraction from the pain, from the burning so strong she was left nauseated and gasping and gagging by it. She could hear Teyla speaking, saying something to the Wraith queen, and Jennifer tried to focus on that, clinging to the smooth tones of Teyla's voice to distract her from the knowledge that once more she had something alien beneath her skin—becoming part of her even as it worked to betray her.

When she stood, it was on shaky legs, dark spots dancing at the edges of her vision. _Blood loss_, a little voice inside her evaluated dispassionately, _blood loss and shock_, and she would have fallen to her knees if it were not for the drones holding her upright. She blinked hard, trying to make herself focus, because this was not the time to pass out. _Come on, Jennifer_, she told herself, _awake, stay awake_, and tuned in just in time to hear the Queen tell Teyla, "The game will begin when we reach the first planet with good hunting conditions. You will both have the night to rest—we want the hunt to be fresh."

"_Game_?" Jennifer croaked, her throat dry and sore. From the stunned look on Teyla's face, this was bad—really bad. "Teyla?"

"Separate cells," the Queen told the drones. "Far enough apart that they will not be able to communicate. This is to be a true test of little Teyla's skills—no planning ahead of time."

"What's going on?" Jennifer asked, trying to clear her head enough to focus, but one of the drones was already implacably dragging her towards the doorway. "Teyla?" Teyla didn't respond, but her gaze was locked on Jennifer's until Jennifer couldn't see her anymore—her eyes were large and dark and sad, but the set of her jaw was determined.

When the drone left her alone in the dark, humid cell, Jennifer lay down gingerly on her belly, exhausted, closed her eyes and kept that image of Teyla before her like a talisman. If Teyla thought that there was still a chance they could get out of this, that they could survive whatever game the Queen wanted them to play, then that was good enough for Jennifer. That was hope.

*********

Teyla did not sleep. She spent the long hours of the hive ship's journey through hyperspace sitting with her back against the wall, staring down the hallway in the direction from which she had come, and trying to think of what she could do tomorrow. With a tracking device in Jennifer's back, they could not risk heading directly for Atlantis—indeed, Teyla had no idea where they would be set down, or what kind of planet it would be, or if it would even possess a Stargate. Teyla could guess that it would neither be a desert planet nor a snowbound one—extremes of temperature that would suit neither hunter nor prey—but many kinds of habitat lay between those two extremes. It seemed that much would depend on what planet lay first in the path of the Wraith. Teyla also doubted that she and Jennifer would be set down very far from one another, or very close—but what constituted an optimum distance for hunting for a Wraith over particular types of terrain, Teyla did not know. She tried once or twice to probe the Queen's mind for clues, but the Wraith was old and cunning and surrounded by many others of her kind; it was easy for her to confuse and rebuff Teyla, to leave her with little more than the knowledge that the Queen was laughing at her ignorance. Teyla did not know anything more than what the Queen wanted her to know, and that was worst of all—it was easy to brace for something when you knew what it is. This was the kind of situation she hated the most.

Throughout the long hours of her vigil, she tried not to think of the worst that could happen. No matter what the Queen had said, Teyla would not consider it a mercy to kill someone who was still capable of rescuing themselves—it was customary on Athos to use the sap of various plants to ease and quicken the passage of those for whom the pain had become too severe, but this was not the case here. For all that Jennifer did not have the tracking skills of an Athosian, born and bred to forest and lake, or the training of someone from John's military, she was not a babe-in-arms either. Alone she would surely have struggled, but between the two of them, Teyla was quite sure that they had the skills needed to make their way home. For Teyla's own part, she would have been ashamed not to take on the responsibility of doing what she could to return Jennifer to Atlantis. It was only that she did not know _how_.

She did not sleep, but she let her head rest against the wall, and softly, under her breath, hummed to herself the songs she loved best to sing to Torren—the songs of the hunt and of the stars over Athos, the lullabies that spoke of clear waters and blue skies and the feel of green grass underfoot as you ran. It was a comfort, and a fresh ache—back on Atlantis, was her son waking up? Sitting down to his evening meal? Asking Kanaan or Ronon where his mother was?—and Teyla nursed both the warmth and the pain close to her until she heard the sound of approaching footsteps once more.

A drone fetched her, and walked her along the corridor and down another level, into a hanger bay where a long row of Wraith darts lay at rest. The Queen was there already, as was Jennifer, her eyes big and her face pale, though she looked steadier on her feet than she had the last time Teyla had seen her. Teyla cocked an eyebrow at her in silent question, and Jennifer nodded back mutely—she would be all right for the moment.

Teyla had barely looked away from Jennifer when another Wraith strode into the hanger bay—tall and thin, he was clad in the long black leather garments and goggles and carried the weaponry which Teyla had come to associate with a Wraith hunter. She sized him up, trying to see if there was some weakness which she could exploit. She thought that perhaps he favoured his right leg a little—perhaps there was an old injury there, beyond even the Wraith's regenerative ability to fully repair, which she could aggravate if she was given the chance.

"All the players are here," the Queen said, cutting into Teyla's thoughts. "Then we can begin. My follower shall track the marked one"—here the Wraith hunter bared his teeth at both of them—"as shall you, little Teyla. Whoever finds her first will decide whether she shall die fast or slow—and then, Teyla Emmagan, I will feast on you."

Teyla stared at her, but did not trust herself to speak—better at least to be given a fighting chance on the planet, than to enrage the Queen now and be killed where she stood. She had not been on John's team so long that she had forgotten all her temperance, despite the bad examples given to her by her team mates on a depressingly regular basis. The Queen nodded at yet another Wraith technician standing nearby, and he climbed into the nearest dart ship, powering it up and readying it, Teyla presumed, to scoop up her, Jennifer and the hunter.

She tensed, ready for the strange pins-and-needle sensation of the culling beam on her skin, calculating the ideal time to speak. Just as the dart took to the air, the noise of its engines helping to mask what she said, she turned to Jennifer and told her the best thing she'd been able to think of overnight. It was cryptic enough that the Wraith wouldn't understand her but intelligible enough that Jennifer probably could. "To the pier," Teyla told her urgently—and then the world dissolved around them.

*********

Jennifer stumbled when the dart rematerialised her, but pulled herself to her feet in time to see it screaming away towards the horizon. Its culling beam activated once more while it was still in view, though whether to set down Teyla or the Wraith hunting them, Jennifer didn't know. For just a moment, Jennifer indulged herself—squeezing her eyes shut and spitting out every filthy swear word that the sometimes-shamefaced example of a former-Marine father could teach her—before fighting back the fear and the anger and trying to take stock of where she was. It was hard to estimate how far away that beam had been, but Jennifer didn't think it could be more than a couple of hours' walk.

Of course, that was presuming that a Wraith strolled, which seemed unlikely, and Jennifer wasn't at all sure how quickly she could move in a landscape like this. This wasn't anything like she had been used to back on Earth, or on the training exercises Ronon had taken her and some of the other medics on, on the Atlantean mainland. She was utterly by herself, without Teyla's comforting presence or advice, her back was one long line of white-hot agony, and even Jennifer realised that this terrain would be tough going. This was old, old forest, growing so thick and lush that if she hadn't been on a low hill, she doubted she would have been able to see through the tree cover to watch the dart vanish into the distance. Jennifer had been set down on a soft, dense patch of moss that grew between immensely large, gnarled tree roots—roots that were far thicker around than Jennifer's waist. It looked like she would have to clamber over them no matter what direction she chose to go in.

And as for what direction that should be… Jennifer turned in a slow circle, trying to decide which way led away from the Wraith, trying to ignore the throbbing pain that lay directly between her shoulder blades. Teyla had told her _to the pier_, which wasn't exactly informative. It wasn't as if she was in the central tower back on Atlantis, standing at the heart of things and able to choose which one of six piers she wanted to walk towards—how could she walk towards something that wasn't even on the same planet?

"Which pier, Teyla?" she murmured to herself, wrapping her arms around her waist in an attempt to fight the urge to scratch at the skin of her back. "Okay, okay—focus, Jennifer. She wouldn't have said anything if she didn't think you could follow it." She had to be overthinking things—go back to basics. Teyla would have known that Jennifer wouldn't be able to do anything fancy, like navigate by the stars. It had to be something simple. The six piers weren't aligned to any compass directions on Atlantis' new home planet, but—despite Rodney's protests that the names were no longer empirically accurate—everyone still referred to them by the points of the compass. Six possible directions she could go in, but which one was— Jennifer smacked herself on the forehead with the palm of her hand. Which were the piers where she spent the most time with Teyla? Either the West pier, in the mess hall, or the East pier, in the gym and workout areas. They often had meals together in the mess hall, but rarely just the two of them—normally they had to put up with the less than appetising sights of Rodney and the Colonel flicking bits of saltine crackers at one another, or Ronon trying to break his own personal record for most bread rolls stuffed into his mouth at once. The gym was the place where she and Teyla were most often alone, especially those few treasured, long waited-for hours a week when Teyla patiently matched her body to Jennifer's, stretching with her through the forms and movements of _eussiet_, the Athosian self-defence practice that reminded Jennifer of yoga. They were definitely alone together now, and more than ever in need of self-defence.

"East it is, then," Jennifer told herself. She squinted up at the sky, where it looked like the sun was not long risen over the horizon. Heading towards it should take her at least roughly east—and hopefully towards Teyla, not the Wraith. She could do this, she could; she was not going to give in to the heavy, trembling misery that sat like a weight on her breastbone and made her want to cry. Hey, she and Teyla had survived being chased through woods before—this time, there probably wasn't even a psychotic Wraith worshipper pretending to be a good guy hanging around. If you looked at it like that, this was practically a step up. "Okay." She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and headed towards the first tree that lay in her path. She could do this.

*********

Whether intentionally or not, the dart set Teyla down so close to the bank of a shallow river that she lost her balance and tipped backwards into the water. Luckily, the water didn't reach her knees, but the smooth stones that lay on the riverbed were a shock enough against her back and rear to force the breath from her lungs and make her grimly certain that she would be quite bruised there within a matter of hours. She pulled herself to her feet, grimacing at the feel of her socks squelching damply within her boots. While she did not share Ronon's finicky distaste for wet feet, the sensation was far from pleasant.

Teyla clambered out of the river, taking care not to slip again on the algae-slick stones, and stood on the bank to get her bearings. She was in a forest, of the dense, quick-growing kind she had seen before on Daerht or Renilb, though judging by the humidity which was already making her sweat, she was not on either of those planets. She craned her neck back to look up through the canopy cover, which was dense enough that it was hard to see the sky. Still, she was fairly certain that the sun was rising away to her right. That was east, then—the direction in which she had to hope both she and Jennifer were heading.

She pulled her jacket off and tied it around her waist as she assessed the terrain ahead of her. It looked difficult enough going to provide a challenge—in other circumstances, it would have provided an enjoyable one—and Teyla was certain that the Wraith would not be able to move as quickly as he might like. She was sure that he did not have the experience she had—as a child she had earned Charin's wrath by spending more time clambering up trees and swinging from vines in order to achieve very spectacular dives into the lake than she had at her chores—and no matter how strong the Wraith was, his heavy black leather outfit was sure to prove cumbersome. Teyla took a certain amount of grim satisfaction from that advantage, and swung herself up onto the first massive, twisting tree root. The forest spread out before her, all deep green foliage and pale green moss and silvery bark. She listened carefully, but she could hear nothing other than the sound of the gentle breeze rustling the treetops, the throaty call-and-reply of distant birds. Nor could she pick up on the presence of a Wraith in any other way; not that that meant much if the Wraith were not actively using Wraith technology, or were just outside of the limit of Teyla's senses, but she had at least the space to run. Teyla nodded to herself, determined, and sprang forward.

*********

Jennifer was miserable and overheated; sweat was making her hair stick to her scalp, rolling in great fat drops down her spine. She was uncomfortably aware that she hadn't showered in a couple of days, that she was zigzagging in an easterly direction based solely on what she hoped was the correct interpretation of three ambiguous words, and that the action of hauling herself up and over tree roots when she could find no other way around them was tugging painfully at the wound between her shoulder blades. Jennifer was careful to go slowly when she had to climb, trying to let her legs take most of the strain and effort, because she had no idea what would happen if she opened up her stitches out here. _Knowing my luck_, she thought with grim humour, _there's some giant predator out here that can scent blood in the air from two miles away. Landshark, ha!_

Then she remembered that that was kind of what a Wraith _was_; she sighed and dropped down to the ground, and impatiently focused on promising herself a good internal chastising for being a dork when they got back to Atlantis —it was a paltry distraction from the gut-churning fear she felt at being alone and hunted through an alien forest, but it was the best she could do. She wished desperately that Teyla were here beside her; even if they were no closer to getting off this planet, and even if Jennifer still had this goddamned tracker in her back, Teyla's presence would definitely be a comfort.

She didn't know how long she'd been walking by the time she entered a clearing that had been made when one of the great trees had come crashing down—to Jennifer's eye, trained by a childhood full of Midwestern thunderstorms, it looked like it had been felled by lightning. The clearing gave her a chance to use the sky to double check that she was going in the right direction; the challenge of how to get around the fallen tree trunk distracted her from the increasingly insistent grumbling in her stomach. She'd eaten a big meal before she'd left Atlantis, but she had no idea how long ago that had been, and Jennifer knew that she would need to find some sort of nourishment before too much longer. Bad enough to have to face a Wraith; worse to have to face one when light-headed from hunger.

_'Doctor, Chippewa Falls Native, Dies in Freak Blood Sugar Accident'_, she thought to herself as she walked along the tree trunk, trying to find a point where it was at least low enough for her to see over, let alone climb. The roots and branches at either end of the tree looked tangled and impenetrable, and Jennifer didn't know how far around she'd have to go out of her way in order to detour around the obstruction. She was too nervous to leave the path Teyla had told her to follow, and also increasingly nervous that if she didn't get over the trunk soon, she'd turn around to find the Wraith hunter grinning at her, extending his hand to feed. _More like, 'Chippewa Falls Native Jennifer Keller, 29, Dies in Freak Chickenshit Accident'_, she grumbled to herself as she chose a spot at random and started to climb over it. Jeez, the copywriters at the _Chippewa Herald_ would have a field day.

It took her two attempts to get over the fallen tree. The first time, she lost her grip and fell back to the ground, jarring her back and making her curse. The pain was so bad that she cried despite herself, tears running down her cheeks and her breath coming in sobbing bursts, though as far as she could tell, she hadn't opened up her stitches. She gave herself a moment, getting her breathing under control and swiping at her cheeks with the back of her hand, before she gritted her teeth and tried again. It hurt so bad, but she managed to jam the toes of her boots into a jagged patch of bark and haul herself up that way, sweating and panting and wondering why she hadn't taken her Aunt Virginia's advice and gotten herself a nice job no farther afield than Minneapolis, doing something respectable and low-key in paediatrics.

"Join the Air Force, see the world. _Worlds_. Ha," she muttered as she made it up to the top of the tree trunk. Next time she met an Air Force recruiter, let alone an SGC one, she was going to… well, be mildly cutting, probably. But this wasn't what she'd signed up for. She'd wanted to help, wanted to be _able_ to help, maybe see some alien stars and have some anecdotes to tell herself in a few years—ways to reassure herself that she wasn't as boring as she had always suspected herself of being. Being chased through an eerily still forest by an alien vampire intent on killing her in horrible ways hadn't really figured into her plans—but as her grandmother had always said, with her best air of purse-mouthed Lutheran piety and a couple of sherries inside her, _men plan, God laughs_.

Jennifer was glad that someone was laughing, because she sure as hell wasn't.

And she still had to figure out how to get back down from this damned tree.

*********

Teyla moved through the forest with all the stealth of which she was capable, constantly waiting for some flash of movement in the corner of her eye which would tell her that she had found Jennifer—or that the Wraith had found her. She opened up her Wraith sense as much as she dared, searching for any hint of a Wraith while trying not to alert him to her presence, but she felt nothing. In fact, there was no movement at all that she could see, not even a glimpse of any native predators or the spoor of any large game. That absence was enough to make Teyla nervous—any forest should be much more alive than this one was. From her infancy on Athos, she had been accustomed to life spent amidst the sounds of the living woodland—she could never understand why Rodney claimed that places like Athos were too quiet for him, not when Teyla remembered the sounds of birds and insects, of the wind stirring the leaves and ruffling the prayer flags which were tied to the poles of some of the tents, the crackle of animals moving through the undergrowth and the ripple of water flowing into the nearby lake. Here there were birds, but their music always seemed curiously far away, throaty and deep, like the calls of carrion birds, and the sound of it filled Teyla with a vague, persistent sense of dread.

As she walked, she occupied the part of her mind not taken up with monitoring her surroundings with thinking up ways in which she could most effectively fight the Wraith, when she found him. Much as Teyla had found the P90 an inelegant and clumsy weapon when John had first introduced her to it, she had grown to rely on its effectiveness—no bantos wielder, no matter how trained or how experienced, could bring down a Wraith so quickly, with so little threat of harm to themselves. Teyla had to hope that she would be able to ambush him, or find some way of making him bring harm on himself.

She hoped that the landscape would be her best asset—much as this unknown planet was not her own Athos, or even any of the planets which Atlantis had called home over the past few years, it would be even less familiar for the Wraith. Neither she nor Ronon nor any member of the expedition had ever come across trace or rumour of a Wraith home planet; it seemed that once they had learned how to grow hive ships for themselves, they had taken to the skies and never looked back. Teyla knew—sensed, in that part of herself that was-not-her—that this kind of climate, warm and humid, was the one favoured most by the Wraith and was probably chosen for this hunt for that reason. Yet equally she knew that they would never be comfortable in a place where gravity rooted them in clean soil and a sun shone overhead; as quick as a scouting party might have found this venue for the chase, the Wraith would leave it again once the hunt was done.

She forded several small streams, thankfully able to cross them without falling in, though she did stop to drink from them—the water seemed drinkable, and Teyla had no way of knowing if she would run across any other water supplies. She hoped to find a familiar tuber or berry to eat soon, or even a burrowing _g'r'tak_—no matter how raw or sinewy, or how much Teyla now thought of the appalled look on Jennifer's face every time she ate it, its meat would still provide enough sustenance to keep her going. The sun was rising higher in the sky, and it was growing steadily warmer.

Teyla rolled up the sleeves of her t-shirt and pressed onward, wondering how Jennifer was doing. The humidity was beginning to tax the limits of Teyla's endurance, and she knew that the Earthers did not consider strength training to be an appropriate pastime for a child. Jennifer had been learning much over the past year or so, her initial reticence, her fear of not being able to succeed, fading as first Ronon and then Major Lorne had shown her how to handle both herself and a weapon in the field. Even John had found patience enough to give her some instruction on the firing range—a rarity given the spectacular bickering which still sometimes erupted over his disastrous attempts to give Rodney further weapons' training. Yet Jennifer was not a soldier, and never would be—her skills and her resolve lay in different areas completely—and she was carrying a severe injury. Teyla's unpleasant, unvoiced fear was that something might happen to Jennifer even before either Teyla or the Wraith found her.

For these woods were very deep and still, and somewhere in the distance came the cries of the carrion birds once more. Teyla was sure that there was no one else near her, from green horizon to green horizon—and yet she felt as if there were eyes watching her. It made her skin crawl, with some nameless fear that was not even _Wraith_. Despite the heat, Teyla picked up her pace.

*********

Jennifer's tongue felt like sandpaper, stuck to the roof of her mouth. As she put one heavy foot in front of the other, she fantasised about iced lattes and cold, cold orange juice and a heavy-duty course of antibiotics for the aching wound in her back and for a puddlejumper to appear over the horizon and strafe the Wraith from a safe distance. She also tried to keep her eyes peeled for any sign of water. She'd not come across any rivers so far, not so much as a stream or a pond, and it sure didn't seem like there were any people around. Jennifer had been trying to remember all the lessons Ronon had taught her during the survival training courses—but that was a little while ago, and thirst and pain and hunger combined were making it hard to remember.

She almost missed it—in fact, she would have, if she hadn't taken a small detour around something that looked far too much like a patch of poison ivy for her comfort. But glancing up at a nearby tree, she saw a bee hive, one or two bees humming idly around it—and she knew, from what Ronon had taught her, that where there was a bee hive there was also water. It took a little hunting, but thirty or forty yards away from the hive, half hidden by undergrowth, was a small spring—water that erupted from a crack near the base of a low cliff and ran away down a mossy channel.

Jennifer didn't know if it was potable, and part of her worried about cholera, typhus, some strange disease unique to this galaxy that would make her turn purple and sprout feathers, but she was so thirsty she didn't care. She fell to her knees and scooped up the water greedily with her hands. It was ice cold and had a faint tang of limestone, and Jennifer thought she had never tasted something so delicious. She drank until her belly protested from the weight of so much water; then she took off her boots and socks and sat with her aching feet in the stream while she cleaned herself up a little.

Almost straight away, she felt more alert, more awake, and she sat back on a large, sun-heated flat stone to rub her feet dry on the moss and pull back on her socks and boots. The socks alone smelled bad enough to make her wrinkle her nose, but beggars couldn't be choosers, she supposed—and certainly, wherever Teyla was right now, Jennifer was sure that she wasn't whining about her feet.

She sighed and stood back up, located east again with a little more difficulty—the sun was almost directly overhead now—and started to walk once more. Jennifer knew she should repress those pangs of longing to have Teyla there beside her—not only were they depressingly useless, but half the time they were for entirely the wrong reason.

More than a decade's awareness hadn't been enough to make it any easier for Jennifer to deal with a crush of any gender—case in point, she hadn't even realised when she'd first become truly attracted to Teyla. First, there had been Rodney, and the pain when that relationship had slowly fizzled out. In the aftermath, she'd been so caught up in her own hurt that she hadn't really kept track of her feelings for a while—wallowing with the Ben and Jerry's was less effective when her brain was engaged. Yet when Jennifer had come back to an awareness of herself, she had been startled to find that Teyla was there. Teyla had been a constant all along, of course, there to console her and to listen to her—a friend who had listened to Jennifer's tearful, late night ramblings and given advice, had distracted her with sessions of _eussiet_ and lunch and play dates with Torren. Jennifer had always been aware, in the abstract, that Teyla was beautiful—first she'd been interested in Ronon, and then involved with Rodney, but it would have taken a much stronger woman than Jennifer not to notice the broad curve of Teyla's smile, the warm, flawless expanse of her skin, or her strong legs in those split skirts.

But one day, about four months after she and Rodney had called it quits, and about five weeks after she and Rodney had once more been able to face one another with equanimity, Jennifer had looked up from her tray of oatmeal and poached _gheersa_ eggs and seen Teyla. Teyla was sitting across from her, laughing as she and Ronon debated what the proper rules for a game of _k'thonis_ were—whether to follow the League standard, or to take Ronon's suggestions and follow the Satedan variant.

The morning sunlight, streaming in through the multicoloured windows of the mess hall, had caught Teyla's hair and turned it into a rainbow of shining colour. The line of her back had been loose and happy, she'd glanced over at Jennifer, smiled, and something had turned over in Jennifer's stomach that couldn't possibly have been the _gheersa_ eggs. Her cheeks had heated suddenly and spectacularly, and she'd taken a large gulp of her still too-warm coffee in an attempt to hide her embarrassment and made excuses about a batch of test results that she really should review. Fleeing the mess hall, Jennifer had hurried to hide around a corner and smacked herself on the forehead repeatedly, calling herself _stupid, stupid, stupid_. Teyla was Jennifer's friend, but Jennifer had never seen any hint that Teyla was even so much as attracted to other women, let alone to Jennifer—trust Jennifer to go for the unattainable always. That might be an admirable trait when it came to applying to the best med schools, but in her love life? Not so much.

She'd let out a frustrated, strangled scream at herself—which was, of course, the exact moment that Sergeant Campbell had come around the corner, carrying a mug of herbal tea, and startled him so badly that he'd spilt it all over his shoes. Jennifer had apologised profusely at the time, but even a couple of months later, she knew that he still thought she was kind of weird. Scrambling up a steep, sharp hillside, she sighed—it wasn't like she could entirely blame him. She bet even the Wraith that was hunting her would think she was weird, if he came across her now and found out that she wasn't worrying about whether or not he'd catch her and feed on her, leave her bones to bleach forgotten on an alien world, but was instead obsessing about her hopeless, helpless crush on Teyla.

_Fail, Jennifer,_ she thought to herself, _Total fail_, and dug her fingers into the dark, cool earth to give herself greater purchase as she climbed.

*********

Teyla heard a sound away to her left, like a dry twig snapping underfoot. In these still woods, the noise was almost deafeningly loud, and Teyla swung herself up onto the roots of a nearby tree—partly to hide her a little, partly to give her a greater view of the woods around her. She could see the general area from which the sound had come, but if the Wraith was there, he had hidden himself well and quickly—nothing moved in the undergrowth, and Teyla could see no hint of black leather or pale skin against the green leaves. There was no sign of Jennifer, either. In fact, it was all so still that if Teyla had not known that she had grown mostly immune to the Wraiths' ability to cast illusions over the past few years, she would have suspected that she was hallucinating noises and that visions weren't far behind—that she was about ready to see Charin emerge from the trees bearing a platter of fresh-baked scones and scolding Teyla for getting her clothes so filthy, or a band of strolling players march out and begin to perform Sutualp's play cycles in full costume. Teyla waited for the space of a hundred breaths, pushing such pointless, counter-productive thoughts to the back of her mind, but there were no further sounds; she let her muscles unlock a little, and stood up to get her bearings.

The additional height given to her by the tree's great roots let her see it—away through the trees, a tall, rocky spire that could only have been made by human hands. Teyla could not see more of the structure than its very tip; it was perhaps carved, or ornamented with sculpture, but she could not make out the details very well. It was impossible to say if the building was part of a larger settlement or not, if it was inhabited or long abandoned, but it was a goal for which to aim—much more preferable than aimless wandering. Perhaps, Teyla realised, trying not to draw too much hope from the thought—perhaps this planet had a Stargate which could be accessed from that building. Even if she and Jennifer could not go straight back to Atlantis, not with that tracker still implanted in Jennifer's back, they might perhaps be able to send a message back home which would tell her team where to find them.

It gave her renewed energy as she walked, let her move tired limbs and a hungry body that little bit faster. Who knew what she would find in that building, but there was a tiny, treacherous little place inside of her that whispered that perhaps she could have some hope—hope enough for both of them.

*********

Jennifer had a streak of brownish-grey moss on the backside of her pants from when she'd stopped to pee, a scratch on her neck from the thorny branch of a bush, and a rapidly increasing heart rate. She was no Teyla Emmagan or Ronon Dex, able to track people through the woods using the smallest of signs, but even she knew the sound of footsteps when she heard them. She hadn't been able to see anyone following her, but she trusted her hearing more than her untrained eyes, and she picked up the pace, almost sliding down the slope of a hill as she attempted to put some distance between her and whoever was following her.

The hill took her down into a valley with a narrow, flat floor. A stream ran along it. Ronon had once told her something about using water to confuse a hunter, throwing them off the scent, but Jennifer didn't know if the same thing would hold true for the Wraith. The wound in her back itched and ached, and she desperately resisted the urge to scratch at it—there was enough risk of infection or sepsis already without her adding to it. She tried to hop from rock to rock as she went, creating as little noise as possible, but every now and then a splash and a mumbled _shit!_ betrayed her. Gradually the stream grew wider, and the valley floor sloped away from her, and opened out to give Jennifer a view of more of this world spread out in front of her.

There were trees, and more trees, and the lazy coil of an extremely broad, brown river—broader by far than anything Jennifer thought she would be able to wade across—stretching away to the right. But then, a little to the left of her, Jennifer saw it—first a tall tower caught her eye, a carved stone spire, and then the buildings that lay around it. It didn't look like a bustling metropolis, but Jennifer didn't think she'd ever been so glad to see a place in her life. It wasn't exactly directly due east of her, but even though it would lead her about an hour's walk out of her way, Jennifer couldn't resist turning towards it. There might be people there, help, even sterile surgical equipment—this was a chance she couldn't pass up. Besides, she was sure that if Teyla were anywhere at all near her, she'd see the tower too and head towards it.

She took off in the direction of the settlement at something close to a run.

*********

The sun was just past its zenith when Teyla reached the outskirts of the settlement. It was large by the standards of this galaxy, though much smaller than many of the great cities Teyla had seen on Earth, or even had heard once existed on Sateda—neither John nor Ronon would refer to this place as a city. Yet as she walked into it, Teyla quickly realised that its relative size would not be the first thing on which they commented—they would be far more likely to recheck the clips in their respective weapons, while Rodney pulled out his laptop and started to scan for any potentially threatening energy signatures—because this place resembled Atlantis on a smaller scale. Not that it was of Ancient origin—it was made of moulded brick and carved stone, clearly by human hands—instead, it was a careful replica of an Ancient city. The silent, closed-door houses tapered like spires towards the sky; the six broadest streets ran in towards the same tall tower that Teyla had seen in the distance, just as the six piers of Atlantis were connected to the command tower that lay at its heart.

It was eerie. Teyla's pace slowed a little as her gaze was drawn upwards to the tops of the buildings. With the exception of the central one, none of the outer towers here were more than about fifteen stories high; most of them were much shorter, but constructed with such elaborate detail that they spoke of a great devotion of time and resources. They all shared Atlantis' angled lines, the buildings' stone polished to a resemblance of that city's silvery sheen, but there was one difference which Teyla could see straight away—at the very top of each building were several rows of carving, running around it in wide bands. This far away, Teyla could not clearly make out the details, but they looked like faces—and the faces looked like they were screaming, mouths stretched wide in agony.

And they were the only faces Teyla saw. If this city had ever been lived in, it was a long time ago. She had no sense of any person living behind the blank windows, the tight-shut doors, and at least one entrance which she passed was draped with thickly woven cobwebs. Teyla had been in places something like this before—towns and villages two or three seasons past a culling severe enough to kill or drive off all of their inhabitants, which had been picked over by scavengers and left to fade back into the landscape, places which Teyla had never been able to look at without feeling her hands tremble.

Yet this was not quite the same—settlements as big as this one were rarely wiped out so thoroughly by the Wraith, for if a site were strategic enough to become an important trading post or religious centre, a single culling alone would not be enough to stop people from coming back to it. Gain and sentiment were powerful pulls for people to stay in a place—certainly that had been why on Athos her people had rarely built a settlement which did not afford them some distant view of the old city, some link to the lost home which they could never enter for fear of being picked over by the Wraith. If this town had indeed been culled, however, it must have been with a ferocity that even Teyla had never before encountered. And there was something more than that—in all the towns abandoned after a culling that Teyla had ever seen, the landscape had soon begun to reclaim the settlement. Thatched roofs decayed and fell inwards, the strong young roots of grasses began to force the streets' paving stones out of alignment, and birds made their nests where children had once slept. Yet here, the smooth grey river stones that lined the streets still interlocked with perfect precision, the glass in the windows was whole, if filthy, and not so much as a vine creeper grew where it should not.

It was as if this place had not been abandoned when its builders had vanished. The hackles rose on the back of Teyla's neck, and her gaze was drawn upwards once more to those carved mouths, forever screaming in stone. Something was not right here. Teyla wondered if the Wraith Queen had known of this place when she had decided that this planet was the ideal location for her hunt, or if it was just coincidence. The architecture here did not seem like a Wraith endeavour—indeed, any imitation of the Ancients was something they tended to avoid—but the unease Teyla felt at this moment was not so different to the kind she felt when in the presence of a Wraith.

She tried once or twice to gain access to some of the buildings, but the doors would not open for her, not even with a well-positioned kick aimed at their locks, and the strongest blow of her elbow could not break the glass in the windows. She reeled in her frustration, which was tempting her to lash out more at them—such an action might be cathartic, but it would be a waste of time even if it did not result in injuries to herself. Teyla decided that she might as well head for the town's strange version of a command tower—if the builders really had been trying to mimic an Ancient city, then there might be some kind of communications equipment there.

Teyla was just about to set off towards the tower when she heard something that sounded as if it were coming from one of the narrow alleyways which ran parallel to the main streets. It was the sound of footsteps, ringing slow and heavy against the stone, and coming closer. Teyla hadn't sensed the Wraith approaching, but she supposed her surroundings and her growing hunger must have distracted her—and here she was out in the open, where any escape of her own would surely be noticed and followed. There was nothing around which she could handily use as a weapon, but one of the cobblestones was pried up easily enough. Teyla hefted it in her hand and slipped into a doorway beside the alleyway—even if she managed to hit the Wraith full force between the eyes, a stone this size would not do it permanent harm, but it might stun him enough for Teyla to take his weapon and do away with him.

She kept her breathing even and steady as the footsteps grew closer, stone held over her head so that she could strike as quickly and efficiently as possible—but Teyla's aim wavered, confused, when she heard the sound of a voice that was familiar, if somewhat out of breath.

"Next time Aunt Gin gives me unsolicited life advice, I'm taking it. Stay in Minneapolis—St Paul if you're feeling edgy—get a mortgage and a Volvo and a non-threatening husband, wear sensible shoes so I don't end up a martyr to plantar fasciitis like she is—could've had all that, and here I am, wandering around an unknown planet with an alien GPS stuck in my back, and really—"

Teyla took a chance, and stuck her head out around the corner. "Jennifer?"

For a moment, Jennifer stood still in the middle of the alleyway—a bedraggled, forlorn figure, her greasy-looking hair pulled back in a tangled bun and her BDUs covered in streaks and stains—staring at Teyla with a look of confusion on her face. "You're not some kind of Wraith hallucination, right? Because it's been a really long day, and if you turned out to be a mirage right now, I really don't think I'd take it well." Jennifer's voice was tremulous, audibly threatening to crack; her hands were slack at her sides; and she looked like the least effective ally Teyla could hope to have right now. Teyla had rarely been more glad to see someone.

"I am very happy to see you, too, Jennifer," she said, feeling her face break into a smile so broad that her cheeks ached.

*********

Jennifer had encountered some of the hilliest territory so far between the end of that valley and the outskirts of the town. Even while wearing boots which had been specially requisitioned by Colonel Sheppard (after insistent demands from Rodney) because they were the most comfortable and arch-supportive available to the United States Air Force, her feet sweated and ached and she could feel blisters beginning to form on the tips of her toes. By the time she'd reached blessed, level pavement, her feet felt like lead, her tread less ladylike and more Herman Munster.

She hadn't encountered anyone in the town, which was a little discouraging. Maybe it was uninhabited—Jennifer had seen more than her fair share of abandoned villages, ministered to hundreds of injured refugees, since she'd come to this galaxy—or its people could simply be hiding. Maybe someone here had spotted the Wraith and sensibly decided that the best course of action was to run away? Or maybe they'd seen a dishevelled, crazy-haired stranger clumping into town and decided it was best to just pull down the blinds and pretend no one was home. Jennifer had done much the same once upon a time, when missionaries came to her apartment door back in Colorado Springs.

She was feeling thoroughly discouraged and miserable, missing Earth and Atlantis and the ability to just sit and breathe when a familiar face appeared around the corner ahead of her. Jennifer stopped and blinked, because she'd scarcely dared to hope that Teyla _would_ be the first to find her. She cleared her throat nervously. "You're not some kind of Wraith hallucination, right? Because it's been a really long day, and if you turned out to be a mirage right now, I really don't think I'd take it well."

Teyla had responded with a so-familiar arch of one fine eyebrow, her face wreathed in that serene Madonna-smile of which Jennifer had grown so fond, and said simply, "I am glad to see you, too, Jennifer."

And that was all the confirmation Jennifer had needed—she ran forward and hugged Teyla, wrapping her arms so tightly around her that she heard Teyla give a soft _oof_. Jennifer was vaguely aware that she was not being particularly cool right now, nor was she acting like someone competent enough to work alongside Teyla Emmagan—not to mention the fact that she was straining the stitches in her back. Right now, though, she didn't care—she was just happy that she had managed to stumble her way back to the one person who would be able to get her off this godforsaken planet. "Have I mentioned that I'm really glad to see you?"

"It may have been unnecessary," Teyla said wryly. Jennifer could feel Teyla's breath tickle her ear, the gentle press of Teyla's arms as she carefully hugged Jennifer back. Feeling somewhat embarrassed, Jennifer relaxed her grip.

"Sorry, sorry. I'm just, you know—big woods, bad monster." Jennifer knew she was babbling—nervousness and anxiety always seemed to turn off the filter between her mouth and her brain—and she abruptly shut her mouth and shrugged awkwardly. The motion made her stitches catch and pull, and she couldn't hide the way she flinched at the pain.

"Is it very bad?" Teyla asked her, turning Jennifer around and matter-of-factly tugging up her t-shirt to inspect the wound in her back. Whatever Teyla saw made her suck in her breath, and Jennifer felt the cool tips of Teyla's fingers brush gently against the skin of her upper back. Jennifer tried not to panic, though a reaction like that could mean only one thing. Teyla had seen the first signs of infection. Intellectually, Jennifer had known that that was a possibility—a probability, even, given the distinct lack of antiseptic used at any stage—but she'd been hoping fiercely that somehow infection wouldn't set in. "You can still travel?" was all Teyla said.

"Yeah," Jennifer said, tugging back down her t-shirt and trying to act unconcerned. Nonchalant, even—hey, aliens slice me up all the time! "Have you seen a gate we could head towards? Because even if we could get to the alpha site—"

Teyla shook her head and gestured for them to continue on down the street. Jennifer followed her on aching feet. "The buildings here are the first construction of any size that I've seen on this planet, but I have hopes that there might be a gate, or some kind of communications device, in that central tower."

Jennifer looked in the direction in which Teyla was pointing—not so far away from them, a tower rose up, taller than the surrounding buildings by far. Its stone walls were pierced in several places by large windows, but though it was still a warm, bright day, the windows were dark and hollow. Light seemed to neither come in or go out of the building. Jennifer didn't know why just the sight of it made her shiver, but she was distracted from her apprehension when she realised something very elementary—something she hadn't noticed until now, because her gaze had been focused so much on the ground, on pushing herself on step by step.

"They copied Atlantis?" she asked Teyla, eyes wide as she looked from the central tower to the smaller ones to the straight lines of the streets. There was no steel-grey metal here, no glass in every rich shade of amber and gold, but someone had done a very good job of using stone and brick to recreate the form of an Ancient city. It didn't seem like a loving homage, though; in the humid, still air of the forest, it had none of the feel of home which Jennifer had come to associate with Atlantis. "This is _creepy_."

"I do not disagree with you," Teyla said steadily. She didn't seem too fazed by the idea, but then she did seem more absorbed in checking out their immediate surroundings—she was taking care to look down each cross street as they went, making sure that neither Wraith nor person was lurking down there. "There is something disquieting about this whole planet. Have you had a sense of being watched?"

Jennifer blinked at her. "I'm being chased through an alien jungle by a Wraith hell-bent on killing me, so… yes?"

Teyla hummed noncommittally, a frown creasing her brow, but made no other answer.

They walked mostly in silence, but after a day mostly spent with only her own voice for company, Jennifer wasn't going to quarrel with that. She stuck close to Teyla, trying to ignore the persistent ache in her back. If the wound really was infected, the pain was going to get a lot worse very quickly; better to focus on what she could still do, while she could still do it. Jennifer kept her eyes peeled, and after four or five blocks, she spotted something—an open door leading into one of the buildings. It wasn't the fake command tower, but it was the first building they'd seen that they could gain access to. Jennifer tried to squash down the useless, hopeful little voice that said maybe it would be a medical building, with bandages and antiseptic ointment and several bottles of wonderful, beautiful antibiotics. "Hey," she said, pointing, "think we might find something in there?"

*********

The building did not look especially promising. The door was wide open, but standing at the threshold, Teyla did not think any living thing could have passed through it in quite some time. Dust lay thick and undisturbed on the floor and the air was so heavy and humid that it reminded Teyla of a tomb. When she breathed in, she could taste dry grit and ash on her tongue; it reminded her of stooping to coax a dampened cook-fire back to life, or walking past the aftermath of a long-ago funeral pyre on a hot and windless summer's day.

The latter thought was not comforting.

But if anything did remain inside the house—any medical supplies or potable water or, Teyla's grumbling stomach reminded her, any food—then they had to chance entering it. Teyla knew that if pressed, she could forage in the woods for something edible, but it would be harder to find medicinal plants which could help Jennifer. The wound on her back had looked bad—jagged and badly stitched together. There had been no sign of pus, no foul odour as of yet, but the skin around it was a deepening red and far too hot to the touch. Teyla had seen the beginnings of similar infections before. Frequently they had resulted in the loss of an arm or a leg, with life only saved by Charin's skills and many sleepless nights of vigil; even Teyla knew that this injury of Jennifer's was far too close to the spine. The tracking device had placed them under more than one kind of time constraint.

She walked in and Jennifer followed her. It was noticeably cooler in here, cold enough to make Wraith flesh prickle on her arms, and dark enough that Teyla had to blink several times in order to make out anything more than indistinct shapes.

"It's a house," Jennifer said after a moment, sounding a little surprised. Teyla could understand why. It was almost impossible to believe that anyone could ever have lived here—that this tall, spare room could ever have echoed with the kind of laughter and music which Torren had brought to Teyla's own quarters on Atlantis, or been home to the kind of easy, cosy affection which Teyla remembered so fondly from Athos. With an effort, she pushed aside the pang which thoughts of Torren inevitably brought in such a place.

Instead, she focused on cataloguing the things around them—two doors stood in one of the short walls, while the longer one, facing the entrance door, was taken up with a low wooden dais. On top of it sat a bed large enough for six or eight people, stripped bare of any coverlets, with two great chests pushed beneath it. In the centre of the room was a large, plain table, flanked by two benches; it was so well made that it seemed to have been hewn from a single block of wood, though one of the benches had been smashed in two, as if a great weight had been dropped onto it from a height. There were shelves on the walls, but they were empty and limned with that same strange, pale dust. The designs carved into the legs of the bed reminded Teyla a little of Thigdurak work—the same geometric patterns and attention to detail; the same black-grained wood—but she could not say for certain if it had been traded from there. Even if it had been, it did not provide her with any clues as to where they were—the Thigduraku's work was prized on many worlds, and had been for many generations.

In the absence of anything else to go on, Teyla stepped up onto the dais and pulled the chests out from beneath the bed. Neither was locked, but the hinges were stiff enough that she had to put all her energy into opening them. Inside were light blankets, well suited to this kind of climate, and an assortment of tunics in different sizes, in weaves as fine as anything which Teyla herself had ever been able to produce on a loom. All of them smelled musty with long disuse, and no matter that her own clothes were sweaty and soiled, Teyla could not bring herself to try any of them on. There was nothing else in either box that looked like it could be immediately useful to either of them—there were some papers, frail with age, but the ink had bled outwards, blurring the edges of letters written in a cramped and crawling cursive, and even though she squinted, Teyla could not make out anything.

While Teyla hunted through the contents of the chest, Jennifer checked out the other two rooms. The door into one was locked, but Jennifer reported that the other looked like a washroom. "Or maybe a pantry? Something. Oh my god." There was the sound of something scraping, and the spatter of water on stone, and then Jennifer poked her head back out around the door. "There's a faucet, an actual working faucet. There is _water_."

Teyla hurried to join her, thirst returning to torment her at the sound of the water. At first, the water was a pale brown, no doubt from having been stagnant inside pipes for quite some time, but after a while it ran clear. First Jennifer and then Teyla stooped to quench their thirst; it had been quite some time since she had been able to drink from those streams, and the sensation of cool water against her dry lips, running down her parched throat, was delicious. In the half-light that filtered into the room, Teyla even discovered some small stoneware bottles stored underneath the sink. Some of them still had a resinous, dried-up looking liquid inside them, but two were clean, and when stoppered would fit into the larger pockets of their BDU pants; Teyla filled them with water for both of them before stowing them away.

"Oh god, that feels good," Jennifer said, rubbing water on her face and on the nape of her neck. Teyla watched droplets of water run down her chin, falling to darken further the cotton of her t-shirt and dampen her collarbone. "In this heat, I feel sweaty as a—"

Teyla held up a hand for silence. She'd heard something outside, something moving on the street. Slowly, careful to make as little noise as possible, she walked back out into the main room. The splinters of the bench provided her with a weapon—however inadequate it might prove against a Wraith at the height of his powers, a stout piece of wood was better than nothing. Its heft in her hand was comforting, a reminder of her _bantos_ rods, and Teyla noted with approval that Jennifer selected a weapon of her own from the wreck of the furniture.

She crept to the door, hoping that the shadows of the room around her would camouflage her as she looked out at the street. The Wraith was at the far end of the block, facing away from them, but his footsteps rang loud off the stone and echoed back from the walls of the buildings around him. He was being careless, Teyla thought with grim satisfaction; or perhaps he simply thought that he would not need stealth to capture two small humans. Either way, it was a tactical error on his part, and Teyla made a note of it. Arrogance was always easy to exploit.

She gestured to Jennifer, and the two of them moved out of the building as quietly as possible. If the Wraith spotted them in there, they were trapped in a small space with no way out; at least when in the open, they had a chance to run. Jennifer had learned how to follow directions while on missions, and much more quickly than Rodney had—she went without any disagreement, stick held at the ready in a low stance which Ronon must have taught her. Teyla focused on keeping her breathing as low and as steady as possible, trying not to let adrenaline speed up her heart rate too much; the Wraith was upwind of them, at least, so there was less chance of him scenting them straightaway.

They had almost made it across the street when it spotted them—Teyla was never entirely sure what tipped it off and made it turn, but she had barely enough time to hiss an urgent _go_ at Jennifer before the Wraith came at them. Jennifer took off down an alleyway, Teyla hot on her heels; they had something of a head start on the Wraith, but he was fast and old and Teyla could smell his hunger and his satisfaction. The air was thick enough with the pheromones he was sending out that Teyla nearly gagged, remembering the way the air had felt around their tent in the aftermath of her father's death. She had come close to despair then, and now she knew that no matter how fast they ran, they would never be able to outpace him, not when neither of them had eaten in days and the Wraith had no doubt fed before beaming down from the hive ship.

Teyla grabbed Jennifer's free hand and tugged her to the left at one intersection, and then to the right. If they could not permanently rid themselves of the Wraith, they might at least be able to throw him off their trail for a little while. When they got around the second corner, Teyla stopped and pressed herself flat against the wall, makeshift weapon raised. She cocked an eyebrow at Jennifer—_ready?_—and Jennifer nodded and did likewise. Teyla had barely time for two heaving breaths before the Wraith came around the corner. This would be a long shot, but she could think of nothing else, not when time was so short and resources were so limited. She made a mental note that when she got back to Atlantis, she would never again so much as affectionately roll her eyes at Rodney when he was triple-checking the contents of his pockets before leaving on a mission. Teyla had been at a disadvantage before, but rarely so severely, rarely when she felt herself so responsible for the life of another. A new jolt of adrenaline in her system made sweat prickle afresh on her scalp as she heard the approaching, pounding footsteps.

Running at full speed, the Wraith could not stop straight away when he saw them, and a well-timed blow from Jennifer caught him smack in the centre of the forehead. He stumbled and fell, and Teyla stepped forward and delivered another strike full-force to the back of his head. There was a crunching noise that told her she had smashed the bone like an egg shell. It was a blow that would have killed a human, but it would probably do little more than temporarily incapacitate a Wraith at the height of his powers. As it was, the Wraith lay prone on the ground, his only movement a twitch of his left foot. She raised up the stick and hit him a second time, hard enough that the grunt of effort that she gave almost hid the dull noise of the impact. Dark blood flowed freely from the wound, and if this Wraith ever rose again, it would not be from lack of effort on Teyla's part. Stooping, she located his tracking scanner hanging from his belt and stamped on it until the screen cracked and sparks flew from it—even if the Wraith could heal from this, he would find it much more difficult to track them.

"Come on," Teyla said, feeling out of breath, and not a little uncomfortable at how Jennifer was staring at her with wide-eyed awe. She nodded in the direction of the central tower, which loomed away to their left. If there was any safety, any hope of rescue, to be found in this town, it was most likely to be found there—and now at least they had a chance of reaching it without the Wraith following them straight away.

*********

Jennifer was nursing a stitch in her side and two painful, tender feet, but after she saw the Wraith go down beneath the force of her blow, she felt as if she could keep going for another while yet. Sparring with Ronon had improved her strength and accuracy far beyond the standards set by the SGC for expedition members, but she'd never knocked a Wraith out before. Given the situation, it felt… surprisingly good. Jennifer tried to focus on that sensation, and not on the fear that she would look over her shoulder and see the Wraith already revived and following them, like a shambling reject from a horror movie. She carried her stick-weapon tucked close under one arm as she followed Teyla farther along the alleyway and then left up along one of the broader streets that led towards the central tower.

The ground was terraced into broad steps which rose towards the middle of the town, though the steps themselves were shallow enough that Teyla could almost have taken them two at a time. Renewed energy or not, however, Jennifer wasn't quite able to hide the way she was limping. "Are you all right?" Teyla asked her as they went, glancing down at Jennifer's feet.

"These boots," Jennifer said, trying to concentrate on breathing through the pain in her side and offering a smile at the same time, "not as comfortable as Rodney said they would be. Refund?"

"I am sure," Teyla said, a half-smile playing around the corners of her mouth, "that when we are back on Atlantis, you may chastise Rodney as much as you choose."

"When," Jennifer agreed, resisting the nasty little impulse that made her want to say _if_. After a moment's pause, she said, "Do you think they're looking for us? Back on Atlantis?" Jennifer knew the range limitations of the subdermal trackers that every member of expedition had had implanted—without knowing which section of the galaxy to start looking in, it could take weeks, if not months, for Rodney and Dr Zelenka to find them. As a member of Atlantis' command staff, she was also acquainted with Mr Woolsey's policies on search and rescue missions. Even if Colonel Sheppard never exactly followed them to the letter, the rules stated that only a certain amount of time would be allocated to each potential rescue. How much less would that be, the treacherous little voice in the back of her mind asked, when no one on Atlantis even knew which solar system she and Teyla were in?

"Of course," Teyla said evenly, "I am certain we will find one another," and Jennifer envied her a little—that her voice contained not even a trace of doubt that the Colonel and Rodney and Ronon were out there right now, exhausting every possible lead and giving Mr Woolsey hell while doing so. There were times when Jennifer let herself be kind of jealous of how close Teyla was to her team. Jennifer had lots of good friends on Atlantis, and between Marie and Dr Singh and Dr Jónsdóttir, she even had a pretty good team going in the infirmary (even if the only exploration the four of them tended to do together was into the abdomen of a blast victim). But abdominal explorations notwithstanding, they hadn't really been bonded together by the kind of experiences which any of the off-world teams seemed to go through every other week. Jennifer had a team, maybe, but Teyla had found herself a family.

They emerged from between the buildings, now casting long shadows as the sun sank closer to the horizon, and out into a wide, paved square that surrounded the central tower. Teyla slowed to a walk, a frown creasing her forehead, and Jennifer didn't have to ask why—there was something strange here, something that raised the fine hairs on the nape of her neck. It was as if they were being watched, though there was no sign of the Wraith, and Jennifer was quite sure that he wouldn't be subtle about letting them know he was here. She looked around the square, half-expecting to see a face at a window in one of the buildings which surrounded it, but all of them were blank. The walls, though, she realised, were not—the upper half of these buildings were all covered in relief carvings, completely unlike any of the architecture Jennifer had seen so far in this place. Where the rest of the city was an imitation of Atlantis' cool, clean lines, these carvings were intricate and dense, crowded into every square inch of space. They were all of people's faces, and the people were screaming—hundreds and hundreds of mouths frozen in terrible screams.

"Uh, Teyla?" she said slowly.

"Yes," Teyla said, her tread careful on the paving stones. "I have noticed it too." Her free hand was curled into a loose fist.

"It's more than the Wraith, huh?"

"This settlement," Teyla said slowly, as if so distracted by her own thoughts that it was hard to speak. "The buildings…"

"The _faces_." Jennifer felt a shiver of pure, primal revulsion roll down her spine. She looked back at the walls. If she hadn't known better, she would have sworn that the sculptures had moved since she'd looked at them last—that the faces were following her.

"You are right," Teyla said as they neared the door of the tower. "There is something wrong here, something more than just the presence of the Wraith." She craned her neck, looking up at the sky, and then back over the buildings towards the woods from which they had come. "How long would you estimate this settlement has been abandoned?"

Jennifer shrugged. Detective work had never been her forte. "The dust in that house looked pretty thick on the ground." She tried to estimate from the time she'd been starting as an intern at Johns Hopkins and housework had been pretty much ignored for three or four months. "Several years, at least? Maybe longer."

"Yes," Teyla said. "And yet we are in a subtropical climate, where green things grow quickly." She nudged at the join between two paving stones with the toe of her boot. "If we returned to a camping ground after a season or two's absence back on Athos, it would take us at least a full day's work to create a space for ourselves once more—but not so much as a grass has grown up here, or a tree taken root. It is as if this whole place has been..."

"Swept clean," Jennifer finished for her when Teyla's voice trailed away. Teyla was right, she realised; trees with huge, tangled roots like the ones she'd seen in the forest should long ago have started to push their way into the town without human intervention to hold them back. Grasses and weeds should have taken root in the guttering and between paving stones; birds should have been building their nests in the buildings' eaves. Instead this place was empty—almost. She cast another uneasy glance up at the carvings, at their sightless eyes and gaping mouths. "Do you think we should—"

Before she could finish her question, she heard it—the sound of approaching footsteps. "The Wraith," she told Teyla, tightening her grip on her makeshift weapon just before he staggered out into the square. No Wraith ever looked particularly happy, to Jennifer's way of thinking, but this one was _definitely_ pissed, dark blood matting his hair and staining his face; his mouth was wide open and snarling. His gait was off, uncertain and shambling, and it was clear that he wasn't fully recovered from the injuries Teyla had inflicted on him. "Run!"

She took a first step towards the tower, and then the ground started to move beneath her feet.

*********

The air was suddenly full of the sound of scraping stone, and the tremor and shock of it ran up through Teyla's legs. Instinctively, she widened her stance, crouching low so as not to fall; Jennifer had already stumbled to her knees. Teyla gave her a hand to help her back to her feet, looking over her shoulder to see that the Wraith seemed similarly off-balance. Whatever was doing this was not the Wraith—indeed, Teyla could not see how the Wraith _could_ be responsible. She could sense his surprise and confusion, filtered through the pain and disorientation of his head injury—it did not seem as if he had known about this planet's surprises before now.

The great slabs of stone that paved the square were moving, changing places with one another so that the stone on which Jennifer and Teyla stood was now two places to the right of where it had previously been; the Wraith was moving away from them towards the square's exit. It was as if someone had made a giant copy of one of the sliding tile picture puzzles Rodney delighted in making for Torren, only Teyla could not see what kind of picture would possibly be put together from this.

"We must try to get to the tower," she told Jennifer, voice raised to carry over the sound of grinding stone. "Jump to the next one."

Jennifer nodded at her, face pale, and leapt to the piece diagonally up and to the left of them. Teyla followed quickly, because the Wraith had clearly recovered and was trying to follow them in the same manner. It was being stymied by how the stones were moving at random, and in greater and greater circles. Gaps were beginning to open up between them—at first big enough for her fingers to fit between, then large enough for her whole foot to slip through if she was not careful.

She estimated they were about three rows of stones away from the stable-seeming patch of land that ringed the tower, but it looked like it would be a challenge to cover even that short distance. "They're moving faster," Jennifer told her, and she was right—the pace of movement was increasing so much that Teyla knew if they didn't time their jumps just right, they could fall between the stones and be crushed by them. The gaps were wider now, large enough for Teyla's whole body to slip between them, and on the next jump, Teyla lost her balance and almost fell—only a quick reflex action from Jennifer, reaching out to tug her back in by the collar of her t-shirt, saved her.

She fell into Jennifer and for a moment, they stood pressed together on a single stone, close enough that Teyla could feel Jennifer's hot breath against her ear. "Thank you," Teyla said wide-eyed, pulling away, her heart hammering with something like agitation in her chest, and prepared to make the next jump, which would indeed be a proper one—the gap now could swallow both Jennifer and Teyla whole, and the grinding noise of the stones was becoming ever louder and more urgent.

They jumped and made it just as a horrible shriek echoed from behind them. Teyla looked over her shoulder and through the tangle of her hair she could see that the Wraith had slipped barely two rows behind them—one leg had fallen down between the stones, and they had slammed closed around it. The stones were dragging along one another, pulling the Wraith with them, and the little part of Teyla that was Wraith could sense his fear and desperation and the overwhelming pain he felt in both his head and his leg.

"Teyla!" she heard Jennifer say, "_Teyla!_" A swift tug on her arm pulled her back to herself, reminding her that they still had to make it across one last gap—now large enough that both of them had to take a step back before they attempted the jump. They just made it, Jennifer with an aborted shriek and a rather ungainly flail of her arms. The shock of being back on solid, unmoving earth was such that Teyla stumbled and almost fell when she landed, but she caught herself and turned to see what had happened to the Wraith. Michael's example had taught her that she should only ever feel safe if she saw a body with her own eyes—and sometimes not even then.

The Wraith was still trying desperately, futilely, to pry apart the stones in order to free himself. Perhaps if he did so, and the blood loss was not too great, he might be able to regenerate sufficiently from both sets of injuries to follow them in a couple of hours—Teyla was uncertain; she had never tested the limits of the Wraith's ability to heal. But even as she watched, the stones opened out slightly—just enough for the Wraith to slip down a little further—and then slammed back closed on him again, crushing him at the hips.

"Oh my god," Teyla heard Jennifer say beside her. From the corner of her eye, she could see that Jennifer had turned quite green, looking as nauseated as Teyla felt disturbed. "It's like it's _playing_ with him."

And it did look like that. The stones opened up one last time, wider than they ever had before. For a moment, the Wraith scrabbled desperately at the surface of the stone, trying to pull himself back out of the hole, but it was no use. It was as if there was something beneath the surface, tugging him back down—it made Teyla think of the time she had accompanied her father on a trading expedition to the Mirakth Sea, and seen a sea snake seize a gazelle from the shore and pull it under to drown it. The Wraith's body jerked once, twice, as he strained against whatever had seized hold of him, but it was to no avail—with one last, abortive shout, he vanished beneath the stones. There was a moment's silence, and then the stones moved back into position. Teyla blinked, and the entire square looked as still and empty as it had when they first set foot in it. There was no evidence that it had been shaking and shuddering beneath their feet seconds before; no sign that it had swallowed a Wraith whole.

"I don't like this," Jennifer said. Her eyes were so wide that the whites were showing, like a spooked horse. "I really, really don't like this. Why would it—what would—"

"I do not know," Teyla said, looking back at the spot where the Wraith had vanished. Nothing moved. She was not at all sorry that the Wraith had been disposed of, and in such a relatively tidy fashion, but she could not make herself believe that whatever power lay behind such a trap as this could be benevolent. Teyla hoped that all she had seen over the past few years had not removed her faith in other people, but it had certainly destroyed her faith in providence. "I have never seen nor heard of anything like this before. It is… disquieting."

"That's kind of an understatement," Jennifer said, the tone of her voice sharp with fear. She had wrapped her arms around her waist, self-protective. "That kind of booby trap is Hollywood-blockbuster elaborate."

Teyla made a soft, non-committal noise. Stooping, she picked up a small pebble that lay at her feet and skipped it across the stones of the square, just as she once did as a child by the lakeside on Athos. Here, however, the stone did not vanish into the green-grey waters, but skittered to a halt some distance away. There was no reaction; everything was still and quiet enough that if Teyla had wanted, she could almost have pretended to herself that nothing had happened. Almost—there was still that awful, prickling feeling that they were being watched by some unknown onlooker. She looked up at the surrounding buildings, to where the carvings on the walls were becoming deeper and starker as the day light shaded from afternoon to evening. If she had not known better, at one point she would have sworn that the faces had moved.

"I think we should get out of here," Jennifer said. "The Wraith is dead, so we can go back into the forest, see if we can maybe follow that big river downstream? It has to flow out somewhere. There might be a Stargate, or maybe there's a coastal village or a town with actual people in it. This is too creepy."

Teyla shook her head and looked back up at the tower. In the gathering dusk, it looked more foreboding than ever, but Teyla had long ago learned that sometimes, if you wanted to come out of a situation safe and whole, it was best to confront your fears rather than run away from them. "The hive should know by now that the hunter they sent is dead," she told Jennifer. She did not open her senses upwards towards the hive to seek confirmation of this; she had no wish to sense the echoes of a Queen's fury just now. "They will send another—several, if they think that is what it will take to be rid of us."

"If we travel fast enough—"

"Through this territory, with no food or other resources, and no clear idea of where we are going? The Wraith would pick us off easily. They might not even have to use the tracking device." Not for the first time, Teyla wished that the people of Earth were more systematic about educating their children about how to survive on their wits—Major Lorne had assured her that not everyone was raised so far removed from the land, but Teyla did still have her doubts. She frequently found such heedlessness irritating—particularly when she was left responsible for facing its consequences—though it was true that every now and then she found such privilege fleetingly enviable. What worlds would her son inherit, if he were freed from the need to watch the skies perpetually for danger? "Remember that they have many advantages which we do not."

Jennifer worried at her lower lip with her teeth for a moment, then let out a long breath. "Okay. I suppose you know more about this stuff than I do, but—do we actually have to go in there?"

Teyla looked up at the tower. "I believe we do." The building's smooth grey walls seemed solid and unmovable, and Teyla had the odd feeling that perhaps the only way for them to be safe was to go further into the mouth of the beast. Certainly, if they went back, they had no guarantee that they would be able to retrace their steps even across the square. The best choice available to them seemed to be to go forward—to see what resources or knowledge they could glean from whatever lay inside the tower. "If you wish, you may wait outside for me until I return."

Jennifer snorted softly to herself. "I'm not _that_ chicken shit. I can do it. Just, you know, if there are any giant rolling boulders or whatever, I'm not going to be able to go all Indiana Jones like you can."

Teyla cocked an eyebrow, and for the first time in quite a while indulged herself in a small, genuine smile. For once, she understood the reference—John was very fond of those movies, and had flushed quite pink with pleasure when Rodney had, one birthday, presented him with a hat which was a close replica of the one which Indiana Jones wore. "I have been told," she said, in her best deadpan voice, spurred on by some imp of mischief in her which had lately become quite enamoured with teasing Jennifer, "that I am quite competent with a whip. After you?"

Jennifer gaped at her for a moment, and her cheeks heated. Teyla was not quite sure what to make of the way Jennifer was staring at her—there was a degree of gravity to it which made it seem like more than simply a vaguely flustered response to some friendly teasing. "I'm… sure," she said, in a strangely choked voice. Jennifer blinked. "Well… on we go, then."

*********

Jennifer was distracted enough by what Teyla had said—innuendo? completely earnest? Oh god, was she _flirting_? No, she wasn't; could she?—that it took her a moment to take in her surroundings. They had entered through an open doorway; Jennifer peered at it, but couldn't tell if had ever been able to close, or even if it had been opened recently. This was the kind of thing they needed Rodney for—no doubt he'd have been able to dig out some kind of device from his bag of tricks and tell them what was going on in less than thirty seconds. In his absence, all Jennifer could do was eye the door warily and hope that it would not slam closed behind them. The walls here were at least six inches thick, and no matter how strong Teyla was, or how determined Jennifer was, she didn't think that either of them would be able to pry back open doors so massive.

When she turned her attention from the door to the rest of the room, she could see why Teyla looked a little spooked. By the light coming in from the doorway, Jennifer could see a space that looked eerily like one of the communal areas in Atlantis. The blocky architecture, the curved steps—even the decorative elements that gave texture to Atlantis' walls were recreated here, only carved from stone instead of cast from metal. The biggest difference was not in the layout, but in the fact that where on Atlantis, the walls were smooth and blue-grey and warm to the touch, here the deep-slate walls were covered with intricate, ornate carvings.

Jennifer knew little about artwork, beyond the usual Klimt poster she'd had stuck to the back of her dorm room door as an undergrad, and less about sculpture, but even she knew that something like this must have taken hundreds of man hours to create. In this soaring, vaulted room, the walls from floor to ceiling were not just covered with those now familiar, howling faces, but also with full-length figures. Some were life-size; some were miniature. Some were adults, wearing tunics or full skirts and angular-looking hairstyles; some seemed no more than children, their heads shaved except for a single long side-lock. They walked and danced across the walls, like figures from an Ancient Egyptian tomb—their bodies were seen in profile, but their faces looked directly out at Teyla and Jennifer.

"I believe," Teyla murmured softly to her, as if unwilling to break the hush in the room, "that John would say that this gives him the wiggins."

"Ohhh yeah," Jennifer breathed, because somehow, these figures seemed even more eerie than those screaming, frozen faces. "I don't think I want to know what they're so happy about." All of them, adults and children, shared the same serene smile—the barest curve of the lips that was familiar to Jennifer from statues of Buddha. But no Buddha had ever given Jennifer this creeping sensation that something was _wrong_, a feeling like hundreds of insects crawling all over her skin—the small statue that Marie kept in her quarters had always made Jennifer feel happy to look at it. Behind the serenity of these dozens and dozens of smiles, Jennifer sensed only self-satisfaction and a vague, unfocused kind of cruelty.

"Nor I," Teyla said. She took a step or two forwards, peering at the figures in the fading light, which made Jennifer feel unaccountably nervous. She was just about to take Teyla by the arm and tug her backwards when Teyla shook her head and said, "We had best see what is upstairs."

"Yeah," Jennifer said, "yes," swallowing with a throat that was suddenly and unaccountably dry.

Teyla walked towards the steps, Jennifer following, but both of them took a hurried step back when the first step lit up. Just as with the great staircase in the gate room back on Atlantis, the steps here were edged with Ancient script in sunken relief, which glowed a bright blue as soon as Teyla walked onto it.

"What the—" Jennifer, startled, took an involuntary step or two backwards beyond Teyla. "You… you don't have the Ancient gene, right?"

"I do not," Teyla confirmed. Her eyebrows had risen up all the way to her hairline. Jennifer had seen Teyla face down all sorts of horrible things—the disappearance of her people and attacks on her home and those horrible few days when Torren had had a very severe attack of a whooping cough variant—with stoic aplomb, so the fact that she looked freaked out was enough to make Jennifer feel _really_ freaked out.

"Me either," Jennifer said. "So how did it know to turn on?" She hunkered down and peered at the inscriptions. Her Ancient was far from fluent, and whenever she stumbled across something interesting and potentially related to her work in the Atlantean databases, she tended to send it to one of the linguists for a proper translation rather than risk an error in her work. Still, she had enough to get by with, and certainly enough to translate the writing here. "It's… it's the _alphabet_."

Teyla blinked at her. "Excuse me?"

"Well, a… I don't know what the proper term is." Peter Sibanda had explained various aspects of the evolution of Ancient and its various dialects to her before, but it had been a while ago, and Jennifer couldn't quite remember all the terms he'd used. "A syllabary, I think? The Ancient script is a—well, what's important is that this is just a list of glyphs." She read along the line from the beginning. "See how it just says _Ke, ka, ko, ki, ki'i_—it goes on like that."

Teyla stooped down to get a better look, reaching down to brush a hesitant hand over the carved letters. "You are correct—this does not mean anything."

Jennifer shook her head. "It's so weird; it's like they want the form, but not the function. Why go to all this effort—why build a whole town to look like an Ancient city, but then carve nonsense into the buildings?"

Teyla pursed her lips, considering. She walked up the stairs, three or four steps, then came back down again. Each step lit up as she walked on it, went dark as she passed on. When she rejoined Jennifer at the bottom of the steps, she took the stoneware bottle of water from the pocket of her BDUs and tossed it onto the second step—which lit up, and stayed lit until Teyla bent to pick it up. "This is not activated by the Ancient gene," Teyla said. "It's pressure-activated."

This made less and less sense. "What, they were pretending to be Ancients? Like kids playing dress up?"

"It seems like it," Teyla replied, taking a swig from the bottle before stoppering it and replacing it in her pocket. "I am not certain. This is like nothing I've ever seen before, even on worlds which considered themselves faithful followers of the teachings of the Ancestors."

"It," Jennifer said with feeling, "is fucking creepy."

"And yet we have no choice but to follow it upwards if we wish to see just what is in here," Teyla said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

"I know," Jennifer said. "But, well. Creepiest yellow brick road ever."

"Well," Teyla said, with evident tranquillity, "we are not, after all, in Kansas." She laughed at the expression on Jennifer's face. "It is a favourite of John's to show at team movie night—he says that the Wicked Witch reminds him of one of his stepmothers. Blanche." Her forehead creased as she recalled how John had described her. "The one who was… pickled in peroxide and gin?"

Jennifer blinked. "Just so you know, I find that disturbing on a number of levels."

*********

The steps lighting up beneath their feet and fading away behind them created a strange effect as they followed the curving staircase upwards—it was as if Teyla and Jennifer were surrounded by a bubble of light as they walked through the darkness. The carved walls appeared and receded around them, smiling faces and screaming ones looming up out of the darkness and then fading away. It made it seem as if the figures around them were not frozen in stone, but moving—watching Teyla and Jennifer's progress, smirking at them, running ahead of them to some unknown destination. Teyla could not remember ever having been in a place so elaborately decorated and on such a grand scale—this must have required the investment of many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of labour; the kind of investment which most worlds in this galaxy, with their populations and technological innovations forever restrained by the Wraith, could ill-afford to make.

The staircase turned, and turned again, passing two mezzanine levels which appeared empty and echoing in the blue light of the steps. The first full level seemed almost as empty. There was a great circular table in the middle of it, something like the table at which Mr Woolsey insisted all important meetings in Atlantis should be held. It was covered in the same fine, white dust that lay over so much of the city, but the last of the daylight, coming in through a series of tall, narrow windows, showed that the wood beneath was still a rich, deep brown. If she imagined away the dust, Teyla could picture this place as the hub of a bustling, growing city—the place where its traders and diplomats and religious leaders came to barter and bargain, with charters and trade negotiations and maps spread out across the table's surface. It was the kind of place which would have immediately attracted Elizabeth's interest, if she had been here with them.

"So this was some kind of meeting place?" Jennifer said as they started up the next flight of steps. "A place for a town government, maybe? It doesn't seem like a mad scientist or whatever would have a conference table like that for, you know… briefing the minions."

"I believe so." Teyla craned her neck to see if she could make out anything of the floor above them, but it was too dim, and as yet she could see nothing. "This building is too central to be otherwise, I think."

"But why booby trap a building that everyone uses?" Jennifer said. "Which is leaving aside the question of why it's not in use anymore."

"And," Teyla added, "the question of why this town was abandoned." She looked up at the walls. There did not seem to be any more children amongst the dancers, just adults with their sharp, angular haircuts and even sharper smiles. She gestured at the carvings. "Do they seem more…"

"The dancing," Jennifer said. "It's wilder." It was true—the angles of limbs, the curves of backs and the gestures of hands were all more exaggerated, with arms raised into the air and feet drumming against finely-carved grass. Yet the faces were still the same—eyes clear and focused, expression bland, smile tranquil and cruel. Teyla did not at all object when Jennifer shifted to stand a little closer beside her. These stone people could not harm them, but nor could Teyla draw much comfort from their presence.

The staircase opened out into another room which took up the full floor—but in contrast to the previous rooms they had seen, in contrast to the settlement as a whole, this room was full. It looked much like the command room in Atlantis, or one of the laboratories, if they had been constructed from a deep grey stone. There were several rows of consoles, all of them much like the ones in Atlantis, with interfaces made of many-sided glass and crystal. None of them were active, but when Jennifer walked over and brushed the dust from the top of the one nearest to them, it began to glow faintly.

At the same time, lights came on—overhead, and from recesses in the walls and near the floor. The room was flooded with the amber and gold light that was so familiar from Atlantis, and Teyla could now make out what had previously been hidden by the gloom. There were boxes stacked in one corner; in another were dozens of crates. Teyla pried off the lid of the one nearest to her, expecting to see nothing useful, and she could feel her jaw slacken when she saw what it contained—several guns, packed in straw. She picked one up and located the on-switch. It protested a little when she flicked it on, but Teyla was gratified to hear the weapon power up without any protest. In shape and size, it was closest to the P90s which Lantean off-world teams favoured, but the noise it made when powering up reminded Teyla—quite cheerfully—of Ronon's energy pistol. Should any other Wraith follow them to the planet's surface now, Teyla thought, the fight would be much more even. The thought made her grin.

She selected a gun for Jennifer and two for herself. The crate beside it contained an assortment of sheathed knives—one she hung on her belt, the other she stuck into her right boot. There was nothing which resembled a pair of bantos rods, which was disappointing—whatever the advantages of knives and guns, Teyla thought she would always have a somewhat-sentimental affection for the clean, controlled nature of a bantos fight—but in a situation like this, as the saying went, a thirsty person should not wish for wine over water.

Jennifer accepted the weapons Teyla gave her with a fervent "Thank you", though Teyla could see from the way she eyed it that while Jennifer might be practical about the need for its use, and willing and able to employ it, she might never be truly glad about it. Of course, if Jennifer could hit a target with any degree of accuracy, then her feelings about weapons were not matters of much concern to Teyla—after all, Rodney would never be considered a soldier by anyone, but he had gotten over his squeamishness with guns. While he still possessed an unfortunate tendency to waste ammunition in wild shots, he had been a help to the rest of the team in more than one situation. Soon, perhaps, Jennifer would have the opportunity to prove that she had much the same potential.

"Have you found any communications device?" Teyla asked Jennifer as she walked back over to the crates. The next one she opened contained piles of blankets, clean if musty-smelling; the three after that held sheaves of documents. Most of them were in a language Teyla could not read—it was not in any dialect of Ancient which she knew. The large, looping letters made her think of various Merthenná styles of cursives which Charin had trained her to write—despite Teyla's vociferous, childish protests—but if the script was similar, the language was utterly different. Ronon might have been able to read them—Teyla knew he had some Merthenná ancestry—but she could not. These documents were either in a code, or in a language related to none of the dozen or so in which Teyla had acquired some degree of proficiency. She placed them back into the chest, not a little dismayed; this, it seemed, was a city which did not wish to give up its secrets easily. The thought occurred to her, bitter and wry, that perhaps it was not so unlike its look-alike, Atlantis, in that regard.

"No," Jennifer said, clearly frustrated. Her voice grew louder and faded away again as she moved through the room, inspecting each console in turn. "It's just like the inscriptions on the steps—the symbols written out here are just…. They're gibberish. And these consoles light up, but I don't think they _do_ anything. It's like they're here for show."

"Ceremonial?" Teyla wondered aloud, thinking of all the ruling houses and synods and communes which she had encountered, both as a trader and as a representative of Atlantis. She did not think she had it in her to be surprised anymore at the methods people would use to claim or retain power—she had seen everything from dynasties slowly suffocating in the airless atmosphere of their own formality, to megalomaniacs who were quite on a par with Michael. Almost all of them had made her quite happy to return to Athos and her people's mostly equitable distribution of responsibilities. "Or were they used to intimidate someone?"

The papers in the chests did not seem as if they would provide her with the answer. They looked mostly official, covered in lists and statistics, though one little bundle at the top looked like personal letters. A thick, small package, it was tied up with a piece of string; beneath the loop was a lock of straight, black hair bound with a bit of blue ribbon. These Teyla set aside carefully, and then let out a low cry of delight when she saw what lay beneath them—half a dozen maps, their bright colours unfaded by time. She spread out the first one on the ground beside her. None of the landmarks on it seemed immediately familiar to her, but the broad curve of water in one corner of the map was perhaps the great river Jennifer had mentioned she'd seen. "Maps," Teyla told her. "Perhaps one of them will show us how to reach a Stargate—or other large settlements, if there are any on this planet."

"Oh wow, really?" Jennifer came over to join her, sitting cross-legged on the floor and opening another one at random to examine it. "Well, at least the place names on this aren't in gibberish—look. _Monnus_, that could be a variant of the word for mountain." She pointed at the large river which curved through the centre of the page. "And _flumen_—that's river, right?"

"In most dialects I know of, yes," Teyla agreed. She leaned closer to follow the trail Jennifer was tracing across the map with the tip of a finger, shoulders pressed companionably together. "And there, this must be where we are." A shape was inked onto the map, a large snowflake in the midst of green trees and the contours of valleys. It seemed to have been added later, the broad dark strokes of the city incongruous against the brighter outlines of this world.

"_Urrbs Nowa_," Jennifer read out. "'The New City.' Huh."

"Which begs the question," Teyla said, looking around them once more, "as to which city is the old one."

"Well," Jennifer said, carefully refolding that map and putting it to one side, "I think I can safely say I won't be spending my vacation days visiting it, even if there's a map in here somewhere that leads to it." Her words were punctuated by a very audible growl from her stomach. "Of course, if I found that map right now, I'd probably eat it. I'd even eat some of that _g'r'tak_ if you put it in front of me."

Teyla got to her feet. She had been doing well at not thinking about how hungry she was until Jennifer had mentioned it, but now she could not ignore the way her own stomach was cramping from hunger. "There are several dozen more crates and boxes here—it is as if whoever brought them here was prepared for a siege. There might well be supplies of food." She tugged the lids off three more crates—more papers; several mechanical parts whose function Teyla did not know, together with coils of rope and several candles; dozens of stoppered bottles of a clear liquid, most likely water.

"Any food would have spoiled a long time ago, wouldn't it?"

"Perhaps," Teyla said, opening the next two crates—both of which, promisingly, were sealed at the edges. "But when we were setting out on the hunt on Athos, we would bring—yes!"

One was packed to the brim with hardtack, the other with some kind of meat jerky. The hardtack showed no sign of crumbling or of mould; the jerky, when Teyla sniffed it, smelled dry and perfectly edible. Ordinarily, neither of them would have looked particularly appetising, but just now Teyla did not think she had ever seen anything so delicious. "Food," she told Jennifer, tossing her a small brick of hardtack and then a lump of jerky. "Enough to eat and carry with us, I think."

Jennifer caught the food and looked down on it, the expression on her face flickering between gratitude at such good fortune and wariness. "We have no way of knowing how long this has been in there. It could be all kinds of contaminated."

"It does not smell spoiled," Teyla pointed out. She picked out a piece of jerky and a small piece of tack. "And the crate seemed quite airtight. Besides which, we cannot afford to be choosy right now."

"True." Jennifer looked at the jerky for a moment or two longer, then closed her eyes and took a bite, chewing slowly and thoroughly before swallowing. "Huh. Tastes like chicken. That's… a little disturbing."

Teyla did not reply, full as her own mouth was with dry meat and drier hardtack. She had had many better meals than this, and the mess hall in Atlantis had perhaps spoiled her with such a varied assortment of foods available at all times of day and night, but she had rarely been happier to have food in front of her. For as good as it was to have banished the pangs of hunger from her stomach, and to feel the faint light-headedness that had been growing steadily more insistent begin to recede, it felt even better to no longer fear that they would soon begin to face a slow death by starvation. They could have gone out into the forest to forage, it was true, but Teyla had seen nothing immediately edible on her journey here, and she was scarcely more optimistic about finding anything between here and the Stargate, wherever it may lie—not when they were being hunted by the Wraith across a planet which did not seem hospitable to anyone. She sat back down on the floor, cross-legged, beside Jennifer as the two of them ate until their stomachs were protesting from satiety rather than hunger pains.

Despite her initial misgivings, Jennifer ate as much as—if not more than—Teyla did. "You know," she said, taking a sip of water from the bottles they'd carried, "this isn't that bad. Kind of salty and bland, but it's perfectly edible. I bet Rodney would love it."

Teyla snorted softly to herself, fond and amused and hoping that somewhere, Rodney and the others were still looking for them. "Rodney would eat anything, if it were packaged and preserved and came with a list of ingredients on the side." The foods most beloved by those from Earth—especially the Americans—fascinated and baffled Teyla in equal measure. Rodney in particular delighted in eating things which were coloured in hues that Teyla had never seen before or since in any context, let alone in food. (John, on the other hand, delighted in introducing new foods to Teyla simply in order to laugh at the look on her face—she had refused to accept any unknown food from him since the incident with the Pop Rocks.)

"Stale Cheezits," Jennifer said with an elaborate shudder. "Ugh."

Teyla chewed absently on one last piece of jerky while she pulled the rest of the stack of maps towards her and started to go through them, looking for any evidence of a Stargate marked on them. It was far too dark for them to set out on any journey tonight, but if they could only find a direction to set out in, they could leave at first light and perhaps be home before they had to spend another night in this place. The thought was cheering, and Teyla allowed herself to think for the first time in a while of Torren's dear face: his dark eyes, so like his father's; his ready smile and dimpled cheeks. It still hurt, so much, to be separated from her son, but even the faintest prospect of being reunited with him soon made that pain almost bearable.

The first map she opened showed no sign of a Stargate, but did reveal that away to the south of the city, perhaps two days' travel or so, lay a large sea. Teyla put that to one side for possible future use; if they could not find a Stargate, then they might make it to the coast, to find traders or settlements or an easier route for walking. She had rarely encountered a shore which was entirely uninhabited. The second, however, showed her just what she was looking for: a dark circle several hours' walk to the northeast of the city. Teyla was not quite so good at making this script resolve into more familiar letters as Jennifer was, but she could make out _Porta a' astraa_—the gate to the stars.

She looked up for Jennifer, ready to share the good news with her, but the words died in her throat when she saw the expression on her face. Jennifer had stood to search through the last of the crates, but was now standing and staring at something which lay behind them. She had turned quite pale; her lips were parted in evident astonishment.

"What is it?" Teyla asked, moving hurriedly to join her. "Are you all right?"

"Uh huh," Jennifer said faintly. "Just, you know. Unexpected dead body. Threw me for a loop."

*********

At first Jennifer hadn't quite known how to interpret what her eyes were seeing—it looked like a bundle of cloth and rags, slumped between the furthermost of the crates and a window. Then she blinked and the bundle resolved itself into a person, curled up into a foetal position, head resting against the window and hidden behind a fall of long, straight dark hair.

"Help me get him out," she asked Teyla, not taking her eyes from the dead person. They pushed crates out of the way until they had created a narrow path through the boxes to the body. Teyla, smaller than Jennifer, went in to retrieve it. She dragged it out backwards, and laid it gently to rest on the floor in the middle of the room.

Jennifer knelt beside the body, gently brushing the hair away from the face. "He's been mummified," she said softly when she saw his face. It was peaceful, with no sign of trauma or pain. If not for the fact that his skin was so cool to the touch, desiccated and wrinkled in a way that you would never see on a living face, Jennifer would have thought that he was simply sleeping peacefully. Physically, he looked like many of the people from the sculptures which filled this place—the same high cheekbones and forehead, the same hairstyle. He was dressed in a deep green tunic and soft leggings; on his feet were thong-style sandals.

"How did he die?" Teyla asked. She'd pitched her voice to match Jennifer's own, and hung back, allowing room for Jennifer to examine the body.

"Honestly, without a forensic autopsy? Probably impossible to say." There was no sign of blood on the body, no clear sign of ligature or manual strangulation in the soft tissues of the neck, and the limbs were all still straight and unbroken. Some of the man's fingers were still stained with dark ink—had he helped to draw up the maps she and Teyla had been examining?—but she could see no signs of other material caught beneath his fingernails. If he had been killed by someone else, he'd died without a visible struggle.

"It as if he just lay down and went to sleep," Teyla said, sounding troubled. Jennifer could understand why—there was something about such a seemingly peaceful death that seemed out of place in this city.

There was something more peculiar, though. "Yeah, but I'm more worried about how he came to be like this," Jennifer said. She stood and took a blanket from the chest and spread it over the body. It seemed more respectful, somehow. "Mummification is a process that occurs only in very particular conditions—extremes of heat or cold coupled with an absence of humidity. This city is certainly hot enough that mummification is possible—"

"—but it is far too humid for it to be plausible," Teyla finished for her, a look of understanding dawning on her face. "So you are saying that this whatever happened to this man, it was not natural?"

"I'd need access to the medical scanner back on Atlantis to be sure," Jennifer said, "but yeah, I'm pretty certain there's something really, _really_ odd going on here."

Teyla's mouth quirked upwards in understated amusement. "So it seems."

Jennifer couldn't think of anything else to be gained from examining the body, so the two of them carefully carried him over to a far corner of the room, then went back to looking at the maps and working out a route to follow in the morning. If Jennifer pretended that she could not see a corpse out of the corner of her eye, then she could almost make herself believe that everything was normal—and if she focused very hard on the contours of the landscape captured on the paper in front of her, she could tell herself that she wasn't at all discomfited by how close Teyla was sitting to her.

She had done that before, when they'd first looked at the map. Jennifer knew that it had been entirely innocent, motivated by nothing more than a desire to clearly see the sometimes cramped writing on the page, but it had still made her stomach turn over with something that wasn't hunger. She'd chastised herself already half a dozen times for her reaction, because surely when being hunted through a bizarre alien city by an even more bizarre race of aliens while accompanied by the woman you had a crush on, surely the part you shouldn't be focusing on was your crush. Surely you shouldn't be doing that when there was a _corpse_ in the same room. But there it was, the inside of Jennifer's head–in between quietly freaking out about her chances of ever seeing Atlantis again, or the pain she was in, or the probability that the itching, foreign thing she was carrying around beneath her skin would get one or both of them killed, she was trying very hard not to think about how warm Teyla's body was, or how good it would feel to kiss her.

Still, she'd gotten this far without breaking down and making some kind of horribly embarrassing declaration. Jennifer took a breath and figured she could last until they got home… and then she would go to her quarters, lie on her bed, stick her head under her pillow and scream until she got rid of all the accumulated frustrations of the past few days, Teyla-inspired or otherwise.

"I believe if we find and follow this stream here," Teyla was saying, tracing a thin line along the map with her fingertip, "it will lead us safely north out of the city, and provide us a constant supply of drinking water. If we leave it where it curves, at this plateau here, it should bring us to the Stargate by tomorrow evening. If the Wraith send no more after us, of course, and we walk at a good pace."

"Sounds like a plan," Jennifer said, resting her chin on her hand, her elbow on her knee. The rest had done her feet good, and though she was sure they would be tender tomorrow, Jennifer thought they would hold up until they got back to Atlantis. And then maybe she wouldn't walk for a week. She had a stash of Swiss chocolate—maybe she could bribe Rodney into building her a hover chair or something.

"I can carry the supplies," Teyla said, before hesitating and asking gently, "How is your back?"

Jennifer shrugged a little. "It's okay." Truthfully, it had settled into a dull ache—painful and constant, but just about bearable. She was never unaware of the fact that she carried the tracker in her back, but at least she was able to physically cope with it. It hurt worse if she stretched or moved in such a way that it tugged on the stitches, but she was learning to breathe through it.

"Would you like me to examine it for you?" Teyla offered. "I know I cannot help very much, but we have water, and those clean clothes—we can at least try to keep the wound clean."

Jennifer hesitated for a moment. That was a good idea, though the thought of so much continual contact with Teyla made her feel more than a little nervous. "Um. Okay? If you want to, I mean."

"Good," Teyla said, and smiled at her. She fetched a clean cloth from one of the chests and produced the water bottle from the pocket of her BDUs before kneeling behind Jennifer. Jennifer gingerly tugged the t-shirt up to her armpits and bowed her head forward. In this position, unable to see Teyla's face, she felt incredibly nervous.

Teyla's touch, unsurprisingly, was very gentle. Her fingertips were dry and warm, callused and smooth from so many years of bantos practice, and Jennifer tried not to shiver as Teyla gently mapped out her upper back—feather light against all the places where it hurt the most. She kept her gaze fixed on the map in front of her: the trees, carefully and painstakingly drawn by hand, each one coloured in green; the contour lines picked out in various shades of blue. "It is better than I thought," Teyla said. "There are still some signs of infection, but it has not escalated. There is no offensive odour, nor any sign of pus."

"Well," Jennifer said, trying for cheerful, "I'm always glad not to smell offensive!"

"Jennifer," Teyla said, her tone one of mild, fond exasperation. "You act as if I have not seen wounds more severe than this many times before." She had dampened the cloth and now began to use it to dab lightly at the skin around the cut. She worked carefully and slowly, so as to cause as little pain as possible, but Jennifer could not stop a flinch from escaping her every now and then. "Not to mention that I was the one co-opted to make sure that John changed the dressings on his toe. In comparison, this is quite pleasant."

Jennifer had performed at least four major surgeries on the Colonel since she'd met him, all of which he'd rebounded from with a speed and a thoroughness which was astounding and more than a little statistically unusual—and yet the man had acquired an infection in his left big toe because of an ingrown toe nail that had been so persistent, not to mention odiferous, that it had been a wonder to all the medical staff on Atlantis. Even Marie, a veteran of inner city Chicago ERs, had never seen anything quite like it. The constant exclamations over it had made Colonel Sheppard flush bright red from the collar of his BDU shirt all the way to the tips of his ears, and attempt several escapes from the infirmary. In the end only a carefully administered glowering from Ronon had made him acquiesce to being treated by Teyla.

In comparison, Jennifer thought, there were probably gut wounds more pleasant than those two weeks had been.

"Yes, but it's not—I mean, I'm not—" Jennifer could feel the words get tangled up in her mind, caught behind her tongue. She didn't quite know how to express what she was feeling, this complicated collision of fear and anxiety and pain and the guilty pleasure of feeling Teyla's fingers trail close to the cotton of her bra. It left her with an unpleasant knot in the pit of her stomach, miserable with the situation and with herself.

Teyla rested a hand briefly on Jennifer's shoulder. "It is all right," she said. "No one could blame you for being afraid in a situation like this. In fact, I think Ronon would say that it is quite a sensible reaction to being made a Runner."

Jennifer let her head fall forward against her chest, because of course Teyla would think she was a coward—Jennifer had been thinking that of herself most of her life, and after what had happened on New Athos, well, first impressions did last longest. She felt hurt well up inside her, but before she could open her mouth to make a flippant, seemingly glib response, Teyla continued, "And I think that to acknowledge your fears—especially about things that are out of your control—shows great bravery."

Jennifer was glad that she was faced away from Teyla just then, because she could feel her face heat. "Oh," she said coherently, and let out a breath when Teyla smoothed her t-shirt back down and stood up. "Well, that's… I think you're pretty brave, too," she said all in a rush.

The corner of Teyla's mouth quirked. "Not especially," she said, voice wry. "Elizabeth once told us that if the four of us were in trouble, then she knew it was a day that ended in Y in your alphabet—which I understand to mean all of them. I have grown rather accustomed to situations like this."

"Yeah," Jennifer said, starting to shrug before the pull between her shoulder blades made her think better of it. "But I don't know that being hunted by a Wraith is something you ever get used to. And well… Torren and Kanaan," she said awkwardly, not quite knowing if she should bring up their names or not. "You must miss them." The end of Teyla's relationship with Kanaan had seemed entirely amicable from the outside—from what Jennifer understood of Athosian society, there were several kinds of relationships, some of them polyamorous, which Athosians would classify as romantic unions or the appropriate settings in which to raise a family. Teyla and Kanaan's relationship, apparently, had always belonged to the more fluid end of the spectrum—they had made no lasting promises to one another and were now what Jennifer, in the absence of a suitable translation in English for _b'sqek_, would probably class as 'platonic friends.'

"Yes," Teyla said simply. She made to retie her hair, and Jennifer didn't know if that was just coincidence or if it gave Teyla an excuse to duck her head and not meet Jennifer's eyes. "I am sure Kanaan is anxious, and I miss Torren a very great deal. Yet fretting about my son will not get me home to him any sooner."

"You don't have to be so hard on yourself all the time," Jennifer blurted out, and then stopped cold, horrified with herself. It was hard not to clap a hand over her mouth.

"If you would like to sleep now," Teyla offered, seemingly oblivious to Jennifer's red-faced confusion and what she had just said, "I will take the first watch."

"You don't have to," Jennifer said, still not quite able to meet Teyla's eyes. "I can stay up."

Teyla arched an eyebrow. "You have an injury and are in need of rest. Besides which, I do not think I will be able to sleep easily in such a bright room. I shall stay awake and ready some supplies for tomorrow. If you sleep for now, then at least one of us will be well-rested for the morning's journey."

That did make a certain amount of sense, and at least Teyla didn't look like she'd been horribly offended. Jennifer retrieved several more blankets from the chests and made a kind of nest for herself from them. She rolled up her jacket into a pillow, kicked off her boots, and tried to make herself as comfortable as she could, even though she normally slept flat on her back and that obviously wasn't going to happen right now. Jennifer closed her eyes, listening to the soft sounds of Teyla moving around the room. For the first time in what felt like forever, she felt as if she could relax, trusting that Teyla would protect her if anything should happen. She slept.

*********

Teyla had gathered together quite a little pile of things before too long—more of the hardtack and jerky, of course, enough to last them three or four days in case they encountered any delays on the journey. The water bottles; the maps; some of the written documents in case the linguists could make anything of them; one or two of the mechanical objects that were most clearly Ancient in design for Rodney to look at. Combined, they were not overly heavy, but they were far too cumbersome to carry, even if Teyla and Jennifer would not also be carrying weaponry. Teyla took two more pieces of cloth from the now depleted chests and knotted them together to create a makeshift backpack; it wouldn't be very strong or long-lasting, but it should suffice until they made it to the gate.

That accomplished, she cast around for something else to do. She could meditate, but she knew herself well enough to know that any attempt to find peace at the moment would be more counter-productive than helpful. What she needed most right now was to be active, to feel herself to be accomplishing something, no matter how small. In the far corner, the unknown man slept, but Teyla could not bring herself to examine him for any further clues. She did not hold any particular beliefs about the sanctity of his body, but she would be lying to herself if she did not admit that such an examination would also take more mental resources than she had available to her right now. She was very tired. Perhaps she could sit down while she kept watch; after all, she would surely hear anyone coming up the stone steps, and the room they were in seemed to hold no further terrors.

Nearby, Jennifer slept also, in the utterly still manner of the truly exhausted. Her face, turned towards Teyla, was drawn into a severe frown, as if even the act of sleeping took concentration just now. She must have been very tired; certainly, Teyla could think of no other reason for why Jennifer had spoken as she had done before she lay down. Teyla did not think she asked too much of herself; her responsibilities were those of a leader and a fighter, and if sometimes it seemed that life demanded more sacrifices of her than she knew how to give, well, there was little to be gained by complaining about it. Indeed, sometimes she thought she asked too little of herself, when she thought of the duty of care and affection which she owed to the people of Athos and of Atlantis.

Every now and then, though, Teyla did allow herself to wonder at the course of events which had created that sense of duty in her—which had led a group of men to wander into the lights of the Athosian camping grounds one night and which had given her a family far larger than she had ever thought possible. Atlantis was her home now, and John and Ronon and Rodney, Elizabeth and Aiden and Kate and Samantha, had all in their own ways become as dear to her as those on Athos. Jennifer, too—Teyla had found an uncommonly cherished and respected friend in her, perhaps more than she would have thought possible the first time they met. And perhaps that was in part because Teyla recognised some kindred thing in Jennifer; because she knew that for all their differences, Jennifer felt the same impulse to look out for others.

Night here was as complete as the day was bright; there was no moon to provide light, and the pale wash of stars in the sky was not strong enough to compensate. When Teyla sat beside one of the windows she could not see anything in the square outside, but she decided to keep vigil there anyway. She recalled the sensation of standing in that square, feeling as if there were more eyes on her than merely those of the Wraith and Jennifer. Those walls had contained hundreds of eyes, carved in stone; Teyla knew that it was most likely irrational, but she felt as if she should keep watch on them in turn.

She must have dozed at some point, more tired than she had realised, because it felt as if between one blink and the next, the room around her had changed from bright with artificial light against the dark city outside to dim compared to the dawn light that was flooding over the horizon. Teyla rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked out over the city to the green blur of the forests beyond. She felt stiff and old from sleeping in this position, and for a moment her mind was still so sleep-slow that she couldn't remember what had woken her up.

Then she felt it again—that too-familiar sensation, like an itch at the back of her brain. _Wraith_.

She leapt to her feet, all her sleepiness gone as adrenaline rushed through her system. The hive ship must have finally decided to send a hunter to replace the one which had been killed. The dart was screaming through the atmosphere towards the city; they did not have much time.

"Jennifer," she said urgently as she grabbed the backpack and slung it over her shoulders, "_Jennifer_, you must wake up."

Jennifer jerked once, and then sat up, looking remarkably alert for someone who had been asleep moments before—the product, Teyla supposed, of years spent on-call as both a hospital intern and the resident mender-of-wounds on Atlantis. "What's it?" She sounded a little addle-brained still, but she was already pulling on her boots and hurriedly lacing them.

"I can sense a Wraith approaching," Teyla told her. She collected the weaponry, and held out the third gun to Jennifer. "We must leave at once."

Jennifer gaped at her for a split second, then nodded, took the weapon from Teyla and was on her feet. "On foot or in a dart?" she asked as she gingerly pulled back on her jacket and hurried down the steps at Teyla's side.

"Dart," Teyla said curtly. In the daylight, the carvings on the walls of the stairwell seemed to recede somewhat, made fainter and duller, but she still tried to avoid looking at them directly. The sight of those vague, dismissive smiles combined with the knowledge that a dart was bearing down on them filled Teyla with a curious kind of anger, an irritated rage that she knew intellectually came from being fearful and hunted and unaware of the fullness of what was going on around her. Acknowledging its cause did not lessen its effects, however, and she tightened her grip on her weapons.

Outside, the dart's engines were audible in the morning sky. In fact, Teyla realised with alarm, looking upwards— "They are sending more than one." A single well-fed Wraith would have been challenge enough to fend off when both of them were exhausted and on-edge, and one of them had been injured—there were at least three darts overhead, and even if they only contained one Wraith apiece, that was more than enough to present them with a great danger. Since the time when she had had to pretend to be a Wraith Queen, Teyla had sometimes practised using the Wraiths' tricks against them—clouding perceptions, confusing their motor control—with the ability born of greater contact with them, of greater pretence at being one of them. Still, she had only ever had to confuse one Wraith at a time, and she doubted her ability to take control of so many all at once.

"More than one?" Beneath Jennifer's eyes, exhaustion had created great black circles, even with the sleep she had had; her hair hung lank around her face, and from the way she was carrying herself, Teyla could tell that her back was causing her much pain. "Oh, motherfucker."

"I do not disagree with you," Teyla said absently while she watched the darts' movements, trying to calculate where they would set down. There was certainly room here in the square for them all to land, but Teyla thought that they would aim for somewhere slightly farther out—otherwise, even the Wraith would hardly think it much of a chase. She did not think they had yet caused the Wraith enough trouble that they would consider it better to kill them quickly rather than slowly. They were still a game. "I believe they will land to the southeast of us. We must go north. If we get out into the forests, we can use the cover to pick them off one by one before we strike out for the Stargate."

Jennifer stared at her, though they were already jogging north across the square—carefully looking for any signs that the ground was about to begin to move beneath their feet. "That's a good thirty minutes to the north side of town. What if they find us before we get out there?"

Teyla set her jaw. "They must not," she said simply, aware of the hunters behind her and the home far ahead of her, aware of the Queen's promise that Teyla would live long enough to see one of those dearest to her die a horrendous death. She ran faster.

*********

Jennifer's feet ached dully, but she was able to keep up with the pace set by Teyla with no more than a pointless longing for a fistful of Ibuprofen and a foot spa. The sun was rising quickly in the sky overhead, and already the temperature was climbing. It looked like it was going to be just as warm and humid as the day before had been, and Jennifer was beginning to sweat. The fact that she did not feel at all rested didn't help either. She had slept, but her dreams had been troubled, nightmarish things—full of bones ground to fine powder, Teyla's eyes lifeless and unseeing, Ronon screaming in wordless anguish and Atlantis in flames—and though her body had had a chance to rest somewhat, her mind felt almost worse than it had before she had lain down.

They took one of the broad main streets which ran north from the square, then turned left off of it and began weaving in and out according to a pattern which seemed to live only in Teyla's head. Jennifer didn't question it—if anyone could keep them alive out here, Teyla could, and Jennifer was just going to go with it. The town around them seemed perfectly quiet and deserted, but just like the day before, it didn't feel abandoned—Jennifer had that same creeping, itching sensation of being constantly under surveillance. It might simply have been a perfectly logical endocrine reaction to being hunted down by murderous life-sucking vampire aliens, but Jennifer wasn't so sure. They'd left behind a corpse in that tower, after all.

She looked up at the flat roofs of the buildings as they went along, her breath burning in her lungs—on one of the training exercises Ronon had taken some of the Atlantis expedition members on, he'd scared the crap out of them by pretending to be a sniper and pelting them with paintballs; the lesson had stuck—and on each and every one she could see those carvings. Maybe it was her imagination that made it seem as if those mouths had grown wider; as if the figures' eyes had all but disappeared, their faces were screwed up in such howls of anguish.

Jennifer didn't think she was that imaginative.

"Teyla?" she asked between breaths as they rounded another corner. "This is going to sound—well, pretty freaking nuts. But I think the carvings are watching us."

Teyla looked over at her, an expression on her face that Jennifer couldn't quite categorise—surprise, maybe—but then her attention was caught by something over her shoulder. "Wraith!" she yelled, and fired off both of her guns, before pushing Jennifer around the nearest corner, and following herself.

Jennifer got only a glimpse of the Wraith, tall and spare and clad in blue-black leather, and maybe a block or two behind them, but that was more than enough for her. She double-checked that the safety was off on her gun and tried to match Teyla's composure. "What should we do?"

Teyla risked a glimpse around the corner, then pulled back again. "If he corners us, we will not have a chance," she said, words low and urgent. "I will run, try to draw him along after me. You should then have a clear shot from behind him. Aim for the head."

None of Ronon's training exercises, intense as they were, had quite managed to recreate the pitch of fear and tension Jennifer felt right now. She was pretty sure that if anyone were to touch her, she would twang like an over-tightened guitar string. But the Wraith was closing in on them, and Teyla was looking at her as if she had not any doubts that Jennifer could do this, and if Jennifer didn't do this they were _both_ dead, game over. So Jennifer nodded curtly and Teyla offered her a brief, flashing smile and ran out into the street. Her hair streamed out behind her, copper bright in the sun, and Jennifer pressed back into the wall and counted to ten Mississippi before she saw the Wraith go past. He strode along quickly, with the confident, assured gait of a predator which thinks it has only to wait until its prey falters, and is enjoying the process of tiring it.

Jennifer took a breath, and then stepped out behind it. The Wraith was gaining on Teyla, who seemed to be deliberately slowing her pace, feigning injury. She raised her weapon and sighted carefully, aiming for the back of the Wraith's head—and then the ground beneath the Wraith's feet vanished, and he fell. Jennifer was left looking across the gaping hole at Teyla, who seemed hardly less astonished than Jennifer felt.

"I believe," Teyla said, raising her voice to carry across the distance between them, "that John would say 'son of a fuck' right now."

"Yeah," Jennifer said, slowly lowering her weapon, "Sounds about right."

"Son of a fuck," Teyla said, enunciating her words with care.

*********

Teyla took a few cautious steps over towards the hole in the ground—large enough to encompass almost the whole width of the street, it was long enough that even with a running start, Teyla did not think she would be able to clear it. She was afraid that the ground would crumble further beneath her feet and deposit her into the pit with the Wraith—who, she could sense, was still alive.

Though not for much longer, she realised, when she peered into the hole. The pit was easily thirty feet deep, and its bottom was lined with tall, narrow metal spikes that each came to a vicious point. The Wraith was impaled in at least three places—neck, belly, and just above his right hip—and his clothing and the ground beneath him were stained with a rapidly spreading pool of dark, viscous blood. He stared up at her, the long muscles in his left leg twitching, as he tried and failed to reach his gun, which had landed just out of his reach. While Teyla watched, the light went out of the Wraith's eyes, and his head sagged backwards, dead—the immediate blood loss must have been too great for even his capacity to regenerate.

Teyla felt sick to her stomach—not because the Wraith had died in such a manner, but because she had been only half a dozen strides ahead of him. Perhaps the Wraith's heavier footfalls had been required to trigger the trap; perhaps it was timing; perhaps a Wraith would set off these particular traps, but a human would not. Regardless, if she had been a little slower, that would have been her fate also. She tried not to imagine what it would have felt like, to have something like that go through and through her; it was more than enough to have to feel the fading echoes of the Wraith's death agonies.

"Oh," Jennifer said, walking gingerly up to the other side of the hole and peering in. Her skin had taken on a faint greenish tinge, and she swallowed convulsively. "That… that is not good."

"No," Teyla agreed, but they did not have time to dwell on this now. That in itself may have been a blessing. "Can you make it around the pit?"

"I think so," Jennifer said, sounding more than a little dubious. Still, she set the safety back on her weapon and hugged it to her chest as she carefully started to edge around the pit. The ground there was barely wider than the length of her foot, and Teyla felt each muscle in her body tense and hold as she watched Jennifer slowly shuffle her way across. Some of the soil at the edges of the pit was loose and crumbling, and now and then small pebbles and bits of dark earth fell free and tumbled in. Teyla half expected the whole side of the pit to crumble while she watched, and she lowered her centre of gravity just a little, holding herself ready to spring and try to snatch Jennifer out of harm's way, should the worst occur. Discomfiting as it was to have watched the Wraith die, it would be so much worse to see Jennifer injured. She did not want to countenance the possibility of having to do this alone, without Jennifer.

"Okay," she could hear Jennifer mumbling to herself, "okay, I can do this, I can do this." By Teyla's estimation, Jennifer had another five steps to go, and Teyla stuck her second gun under her arm and stretched out a hand, ready to offer Jennifer an extra measure of support as soon as she was close enough. Four, three, and then Teyla sensed two more Wraith approaching from two separate directions—both of them seemed angry and focused and _hungry_, and they were fast.

"You must hurry," she told Jennifer, "there are more coming, and they are running."

"Shit," Jennifer said, "fuck," and took an awkward half-leap, half-stumble, so that she lost her balance when she landed and teetered into Teyla. For a moment, Teyla had her arms full of warm, shuddering Jennifer, and then Jennifer said, "Um," and "Graceful, huh?" and was pulling away.

Teyla blinked at her, because there was that same odd, flickering something in Jennifer's expression that she could not quite decipher—that intrigued her and made her curious in equal measure—but she had neither the time nor the free attention to wonder about it now. There were Wraith closing in on them, and traps all around them—she could think about it later, but for right now, they had to get out of this town. "To the right," she said.

"Okay," Jennifer said, and took off down the alleyway that led to the right, Teyla right behind her. The paving here was less even than it was in the main streets, cobblestones rather than flat slabs of stone, and once or twice Teyla almost lost her footing. She had to look down repeatedly as she ran, trying to stay aware of any potential stumbling blocks, or any possible pitfalls—a mistake which meant that she did not anticipate the strangled scream Jennifer gave, or the sound of splitting stone.

*********

Jennifer didn't know what sixth sense had made her come to a sudden halt, but she was so glad it had. Bare inches ahead of her, the wall on her right-hand side had unleashed a furious, vicious volley of at least a dozen spears at the wall to her left. The force behind the spears was enough to make them embed themselves deep into the stone. The sound of it was horrendous, and Jennifer couldn't stop the instinctive shriek from escaping her.

"Are you all right?" she heard Teyla say from behind her.

"Um," Jennifer said.

"Good," Teyla replied breathlessly, "because they have found us."

Jennifer whirled around to see two Wraith standing at the far end of the alleyway. Reaching behind her, she tried to tug the bolts out of the wall, but she gave up after the first two attempts. The spear handles were thick and strong enough that they couldn't easily be broken, the heads of the spears so firmly embedded in the walls that it would not be a simple task to pull them out. They were trapped here, and the Wraith were coming closer. Jennifer raised her gun and flicked off the safety; despite her rising fear, she felt somewhat comforted by the low whine of the gun powering up.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jennifer could see Teyla take a similar stance, one firearm in either hand and looking like a heroine in an action movie. "Ready?" Teyla asked her.

"As I'll ever be," Jennifer said. Adrenaline was shivering through her veins, turning the whole world bright and too sharp around her. She'd never had to face down anything like this before, never had to rely quite so thoroughly on what she was capable of, but there was something reassuring in the way Teyla had asked her that—as if all she was asking for was confirmation of what she already thought Jennifer could do.

They fired. The recoil on the weapons was a little stronger than Jennifer was used to from the P90s, the sight not quite as precise, and she took half a step backwards to compensate. She tried her best to remember all the things Ronon had taught her—aiming for the centre of mass, keeping her breathing even—and tried not to despair as the Wraith shuddered with each hit but kept coming.

Teyla was being more precise—she was aiming to take out the Wraiths' kneecaps. One of them was already dragging his left leg behind him; the other was limping. Jennifer decided to take a leaf out of Teyla's book. She adjusted her aim a little, and fired at the Wraiths' heads.

It took a long time for them to go down, and even when the second one finally lay still, Jennifer didn't think that it was truly dead. She fired another round into its head, just to be certain, and swallowed back the bile that was rising in her throat. She had killed, and with intent to kill. She was sure that she would vomit over this later, copiously and repeatedly, but there was no time for that right now.

"Is that all of them?" she asked Teyla. Her forehead was aching with what she was pretty sure was the beginning of a tension headache. Three Wraith dead, three darts, but that was not necessarily all of them—dozens more could have been rematerialised when the darts set down. Jennifer knew enough to know that this was not the end of it.

Teyla frowned. "I cannot sense any right now, but that does not necessarily mean that there are no more. If they are approaching on foot and not directly communicating with one another, or using Wraith technology, it is harder for me to sense them."

Jennifer bit her lip and nodded. It would not be very useful if she were to scream or cry or punch a wall right now. "So what do we do?"

Teyla considered. "It would take us too long to retrace our steps and find another route out of the city," she said. "And I am not happy at the thoughts of having to go deeper into it once more."

That, Jennifer had to agree with.

"Do you think you would be able to climb over these?" Teyla gestured at the spear poles. Jennifer eyed them; they looked sturdy enough to take their weight, though Jennifer imagined that the pull and stretch on her back would not be fun. Still, what other choice did she have?

"Yeah," she said. "I think so."

Teyla went over first. She slid the guns underneath the lowest of the spears and then began to haul herself up and over them. The topmost quivered slightly as she balanced herself on top of it for a moment, and then Teyla leapt down to the ground on the far side and retrieved her weapons. Jennifer handed through her gun, and then prepared to follow.

She tried to let her legs take the brunt of the effort, but there was no getting away from the fact that she had to put her arms over her head to help pull herself up. The pull and stretch in her upper back made her gasp and brought tears to her eyes. Her arms trembled, and for a moment Jennifer had to pause and get back her breath.

"Jennifer?" Teyla asked, voice rich with concern, "Are you all right?"

"'M'fine," Jennifer said through gritted teeth. "Fine," and with one last effort got herself to the top of the barricade. She knew she wouldn't be able to drop to the other side as Teyla had done—it would jar her back far too much, and she didn't want to run the risk of bursting open her stitches and having to make the last leg of the journey with a freely bleeding wound. She didn't _think_ that a Wraith would be able to track her through the woods like a blood hound—they had an implant in her back, anyway—but Jennifer didn't want to find out if there were any other predators lurking out amongst those trees. Carefully, she swung a leg over and slowly climbed down. She knew that Teyla must be growing impatient with her, but when Jennifer finally felt solid ground beneath her feet again, Teyla did nothing more than touch her briefly, reassuringly, on her shoulder, hand her her weapon once more, and nod in the direction they were to go in.

Jennifer found she was glad that Teyla hadn't asked her any further questions. She knew that talking about the pain wouldn't help her right now—stretched thin as she was, scraped and sore from injuries and fear and too-little sleep, she was hard-pressed to do anything more than put one foot in front of another. Maybe it was psychosomatic, maybe it was the power of not-really-all-that-positive thinking, but the more Jennifer pushed the pain away to some distant corner of her mind, the easier it was for her to deal with. She knew that it would probably hurt worse when they got back to Atlantis and she finally had access to antibiotics and morphine, but at least there, she would have the luxury of being vulnerable. Talking about it would demand too much energy from her right now, just as dealing with Teyla's continual proximity to her—the press of her shoulder against Jennifer's, the warmth of her palm against Jennifer's arm, the curve of her smile seen up close—was getting to be a little too much for Jennifer to handle. She had just enough energy to cope with the stress of being hunted down like an animal; knowing that she had to try not to act like a crush-addled, incompetent idiot in front of Teyla at the same time was wearing her down.

Yet here she was; she had to cope, she had no other choice, and so she kept pace at Teyla's side and kept her eyes fixed on the road in front of them.

*********

They made it out of the town a little before midday. They did not encounter any more Wraith, but their progress was made slower by how cautious they had to be—experience now showed that booby traps could be anywhere. There were no more surprise volleys of spears, but an unusually broad, bare area of paving stones had made Teyla suspicious. A handful of pebbles thrown at it had shown that it was home to the same shifting, moving stones as the square around the tower. That had forced them to make another diversion, and so the sun was already high in the sky by the time they finally stepped off the last of that silvery grey stone and onto lush green grass. Crossing that small distance was enough to fill Teyla with relief, lifting a strange weight from her shoulders, and judging from the sigh she let out, Jennifer felt it too. Teyla looked back at the town—at its rows of silent houses, the flat solidity of its stone, the innocuous-seeming tower at the heart of it all—and thought that even the air felt different here. Teyla could breathe more easily here. The air was still humid, but it did not feel so oppressive.

"Which way do we go?" Jennifer asked. She seemed subdued, and Teyla noted with concern that she was holding her upper body stiffly, as if she were in great pain. When they next stopped to rest, Teyla would have to insist on inspecting the wound; it would be no good for either of them to push onwards if Jennifer were not capable of speed right now.

Teyla pulled out the map from her makeshift backpack and inspected it. It was hard to be absolutely certain of their location, but judging by the position of the sun in the sky and their orientation relative to the central tower, she thought they were a little to the east of where they needed to be. "We need to head west," she told Jennifer, tracing out a route on the map. "Until we reach this stream, which should lead us due north."

"Okay," Jennifer said quietly, and the two of them walked side by side along the perimeter of the city, keeping a careful watch out for any Wraith and listening intently for the sound of running water. Teyla was pleased to see that the lessons Ronon had taught Jennifer and the other medics on how to behave in the field were holding even now—Jennifer had not dropped her guard, though they were out of the city, and she carried her gun at the ready at all times. Jennifer would never make a soldier, but something in the way she carried herself had changed since she came to Atlantis. There was just enough new confidence there to give direction to Jennifer's sense of purpose. Teyla was not quite sure when that change had occurred, or when it was that she had first begun to notice Jennifer so particularly, but there it was, and Teyla was glad of it—it had given her a new companion on Atlantis, and an ally here.

Perhaps half an hour's walk took them to the stream. It was not a large body of water—narrow enough to be easily jumped across, it flowed shallowly over a bed of smooth, round stones and vanished into the grating of a drain at the city's boundary. They turned north to walk along the eastern bank of the stream; Teyla was glad to know that her back was to that strange place. Trees grew right up to the edge of the water, and here and there Teyla and Jennifer had to grasp at branches for balance as they walked, or scramble carefully over some of the huge, twisting tree roots that arched up and into the streambed.

Neither of them were inclined to talk much as they walked, which Teyla found suited her right now. As the adrenaline slowly left her system and the awareness of the Wraith faded away from the edges of her consciousness, Teyla felt exhausted. She had enough energy to keep walking, enough mental strength to keep aware of what was going on around her, but that was it. By the time they stopped for lunch, Teyla's BDU pants were damp to the knees from the time she'd been forced to put a foot into the water to help keep her balance, her t-shirt was once more stained a darker black under the arms and along the back from sweat, and her face ached with tiredness.

She sat cross-legged on the low, broad root of a tree while she chewed her mouthfuls of hardtack and jerky. In this heat, the salty nature of them made her thirsty from the first bite, but Teyla felt tired enough that she could not stomach the thought of getting down from her perch to refill her water bottle from the stream. Jennifer, slumped beside her, seemed similarly exhausted, though she kept a firm grip on her gun even while she ate.

"If you want," Jennifer said, when she'd finished her lump of hardtack, "you can take a nap for a while. I can keep watch."

The thought was appealing, and for a moment, Teyla almost agreed. The sun was hot overhead, even mitigated as it was by the shade provided by the canopy cover of the trees; the thoughts of lying down and closing her eyes, for however short a time, was intoxicating. Yet she knew that it would not be a good idea. "I will be fine," she said. "I have gone for longer without sleep before this, in worse conditions. But I do think we should take a look at your back before we continue."

Jennifer shook her head, and slid down gently onto the ground. "It's fine," she said, and the tone in her voice was such that Teyla was almost convinced that she was. Almost.

Teyla arched an eyebrow at her. They may not have had the luxury of time, but she hoped that she could still spare a moment for something so basic as common concern. "We still have half a day's journey ahead of us. That is a long time to walk if you are in much pain from your back—and if you are in severe pain, that will prolong our journey even more."

"I'll be okay."

"_Jennifer_." She had not pinned Jennifer as one to be stubborn for the sake of it, but judging by the way she was chewing at her lower lip and refusing to meet Teyla's gaze, she was promising to give a petulant Torren a run for his money—perhaps even a John Sheppard who had not gotten his way. Atlantis seemed to have a way of attracting the most stubborn, the most steadfast in their wishes and affections, to its shores—however dissimilar the slowly swelling ranks of its people might seem at first glance.

Jennifer visibly wavered for a moment, then turned her back to Teyla and yanked up her t-shirt with enough force that Teyla winced on her behalf. She hopped down from her perch on the root and went to inspect the wound, but it did not require touch to see that the muscles in Jennifer's bank were all tensed and knotted, and that she had flinched when she thought that Teyla was about to touch her. Surprise fought with worry fought with hurt inside Teyla—she did not know what she could have done to cause such a reaction. She hoped she had not inflicted too much pain on Jennifer the last time she had looked at the wound; but then, she had not sensed that Jennifer had been hiding any pain that time.

"Jennifer?" Teyla deliberately kept her voice soft and pitched low. "If I hurt you before, I am sorry, but I really do have to see to this wound."

She heard Jennifer inhale sharply, as if about to say something, but instead she shook her head and let out a long, unsteady breath. The long muscles of her back forcibly relaxed and Jennifer said, "It's okay, really. I—I'm just tired, that's all."

"Good," Teyla said slowly. She did not think that was it at all—or if it was, it was only a half-truth. Regardless, Jennifer clearly did not wish to talk about it, and this was not the time or the place to press the matter. She turned her attention back to the wound. The coarse, black thread of the stitches stood out against the pale and livid red skin of Jennifer's back. Teyla thought that perhaps there was a little more redness to the skin than there had been last time she had looked, but in this environment it was hard to tell—there was no medical equipment, and for all that Teyla could brew up a passable tisane to help cope with a headache or menstrual cramps, she was no medic. She could tell that there was still no sign of pus, which was good, but there was something about the shape of the tracker beneath the skin which felt a little different to her probing fingertips. For a moment, Teyla debated over whether or not she should tell Jennifer, but Jennifer had a right to know about her own body—besides which, she was a doctor, and had studied Wraith medical technology. She would know if what Teyla had felt was possible, far more than Teyla herself.

"The wound seems to be healing," Teyla told her, taking a step back and giving Jennifer space to tug back down her t-shirt.

"But?" Jennifer said, obviously picking up on the hesitation in Teyla's voice.

"I am not entirely sure if… I mean." Teyla, trained since the cradle by her father and Charin in the value of carefully deciding what to say before she spoke, was not accustomed to stumbling over her words. She took a deep breath and said, on the exhale, "I believe the tracking implant is changing shape."

Jennifer turned to look at her, both eyes wide. "Excuse me?"

"I know that it sounds impossible, but at first, it felt more like a lump beneath the skin," Teyla explained, sketching the shape with both hands, "like a cube, centered over your vertebra. But now it feels as if it has been flattened out somewhat—it is more like a rectangle, spreading out towards your shoulder blades." She splayed her fingers outwards, making wings of them.

Jennifer went pale beneath the flush of sunburn on her cheeks and forehead, and Teyla felt a corresponding chill. That was not the shock of surprise on Jennifer's face. Jennifer gathered up their belongings and began to follow the stream north once more, head bowed, clearly intending to pretend that she had not heard what Teyla had just said. Yet Teyla did not intend to let this drop. "You know what this is?"

They walked onwards in silence for some minutes before Jennifer spoke. "We've known for the past while that the Wraith are working on new forms of technology." She sounded strangely formal and distant, as if she were unwillingly presenting a report to an IOC representative. "Ones which take… better advantage of human physiology and are harder for us to counteract."

Teyla frowned. "I have heard nothing of this."

"I heard rumours from some scientists on Olézil," Jennifer said, splashing around a particularly large root, "and a midwife on Zsaal sent me a report. The Wraith are said to be—to be experimenting."

Teyla's blood ran cold. She could not hear that word and associate it with anything other than what Michael had done to her people, and had almost done to her son—pain and misery and torture inflicted, all in the name of the profit and gain of others. "On people?" She remembered that Jennifer had said _midwife_, and corrected herself. "On _children_?"

"Mr Woolsey said that it would be best not to tell anyone," Jennifer continued, as if Teyla had not spoken, "At least not until I had more proof, because people gossip and it might just have been rumours." She laughed a little, her voice cracking strange and hollow. "And now I do—they've found a way to create a tracking device which fuses with the host's skeleton, making it much more difficult to remove. Apparently we were ruining too much of the Wraith's fun, helping those Runners go free. If that hive has access to the same kind of technology, then it's probably too late. If it's changing shape, it's… it's probably too late."

"Jennifer—" She reached out to touch Jennifer on the arm, but she flinched away from her.

Jennifer turned to look Teyla in the eyes for the first time since they had stopped for lunch. The look in her eyes was resigned, dull and lacking all of Jennifer's usual energy. "I can walk with you back to the gate, but you'll have to go back without me. I can't bring this back to Atlantis with me. I can't go home."

*********

It was weird. At one and the same time, Jennifer felt sick to her stomach and as if her body didn't quite belong to her. _Dissociation, most likely_, a little part of her was whispering. _A way for the body to deal with shock and trauma_, because the thing was, she hadn't anticipated this. She had known about the Wraith's technological experimentations; she was all too well aware that she had a piece of that technology embedded beneath her skin, and had been coping with that awareness as best she could. Yet Jennifer hadn't thought—hadn't wanted to think?— of what it would mean for her if their experimentations had extended to this particular tracking device.

With every step she took, she imagined that she could feel the device working itself a little further into her body, fusing itself a little more completely with her bones—a morbid notion that did little to raise her levels of optimism. Even if Dr Singh could successfully remove the tracker, Jennifer couldn't set foot on Atlantis in order for him to carry out the surgery—since Atlantis had returned to the Pegasus Galaxy from Earth, they'd successfully managed to hide its location from the Wraith, and Jennifer would not risk the safety of her best friends for her sake.

"We will find a way," Teyla was saying to her. "Some method that has not previously been considered—the Wraith are not infallible. There must be some flaw that we can exploit."

"Maybe," Jennifer said, but she couldn't stop herself from feeling just a little fatalistic. She'd gotten this far with Teyla's help, but there was only so much she could cope with at once, and she had the horrible, sinking feeling that she wouldn't get much farther.

"Please do not despair," Teyla said, tucking one of her weapons under her arm and reaching out with her free hand to clasp Jennifer's. Her hand was warm and dry against Jennifer's own, and Jennifer's traitorous, treacherous heart flipped over in her chest. For the first time since she'd put together the pieces in her head, she felt anchored in her own body, and Jennifer couldn't help herself from squeezing Teyla's hand, just a little. Teyla's index finger brushed against Jennifer's wrist, right over the pulse point—Jennifer felt her breath hiccup softly at that fleeting, unintentional touch.

Jennifer tried for a smile. "I'm not despairing. It's just, you know—"

Teyla's hand slipped away from hers. "I know _you_, Jennifer Keller. And therefore I know that you are quite prone to underestimating yourself"—Jennifer tried to protest—"even while you are more than capable of finding a way out of this predicament."

"Yeah, that's me," Jennifer said weakly, "able to leap tall Wraith and evil bits of invasive alien technology in a single bound."

Teyla gave her a careful look, the one that Rodney said was the one she gave you when she couldn't quite figure out if what you'd just said was some arcane Earth reference, or proof that you'd finally proved her worst fears right and gone off the deep end.

"Maybe I'll think of something," Jennifer said, just to assuage Teyla's worry, and felt more than a little guilty when her words brought an instant, broad smile to Teyla's face.

The terrain here was not so bad. Though it had not quite become a river, the stream had broadened out a little, and there was more room for Jennifer and Teyla to walk on either side of it. The ground levelled out, its occasional unevenness not enough to really test their legs, and with the sun past its zenith, the temperature was finally starting to drop. Underneath Jennifer's feet, the ground was soft and covered with lush grasses and blue-green mosses; the hard, grey streets of that strange city were far behind them by now, and if Jennifer had been able to shake the feeling that she was marked and hunted, it would almost have been a pleasant walk.

It was all the more so when Teyla began to hum gently under her breath, a delicate, lilting melody with a rhythmic beat to it, and Jennifer found her footsteps beginning to keep time with it. "What is that?" she asked.

"What—oh!" Teyla seemed surprised, as if she had not realised that Jennifer would be able to hear her. "It is a—well, on Athos it was sung when we were moving out from one campground to another. The journeys could be long and uneventful, so we would sing to one another to pass the time. A walking song, perhaps you could call it. The rhythm of it helped to pace us, as well. This melody was one which my mother began, though others have added to it over the years."

"Oh." Jennifer had rarely heard Teyla mention her mother. More than once, she'd heard her talk about her father and his death in a relatively minor culling, and every now and then Jennifer would catch her telling Torren some tale of his grandfather and namesake, though he was still surely too young to understand any of them. Tagan Emmagan, however, had never been mentioned in Jennifer's presence, and she had heard from Rodney that all that even Ronon knew was that she had died hard. She had never told Rodney or the Colonel more than her mother's name. Jennifer didn't know quite how to respond to this unexpected mention of her mother, beyond feeling a little awkward and off-kilter. She settled for saying, "It's very pretty."

The smile that flickered over Teyla's face was part genuine amusement, part ruefulness. "The lyrics," she said, "are a vow that—" If Jennifer hadn't known that Teyla was the kind of person who never got embarrassed, she would have _sworn_ that Teyla looked embarrassed. "—well, they are rather ribald. It is part of Torren's heritage that he won't learn until he is quite a bit older."

Jennifer made a valiant attempt not to choke on her own spit. "You mean—sex lyrics?"

"Not as such," Teyla said, but she was very pointedly not meeting Jennifer's eyes.

"Your mom made up a sex song!"

"It is a song about the, the nature of Spring," Teyla said weakly. "There are some references to—"

"It's totally a sex song! Wow," Jennifer said. "My mom just listened to a lot of Elvis." She had a thought. "Have you told Colonel Sheppard about it?"

Teyla arched a bemused eyebrow. "I think we both know that John would be quite disconcerted by—oh. That would not be very nice, Jennifer." Reproach, however, was clearly warring with amusement in her voice.

"It'd be fun, though," Jennifer said. They'd reached a point in the stream where it contained a small cascade waterfall, and she had to keep her gaze firmly fixed on the slippery tiers of rock that made up the land either side of the stream here. If she slipped and fell and hit her head, then there might be very little chance that she could safely remove the tracking device. "You know what he's like when he's all embarrassed. Remember when Lakshmi mentioned that she had cramps in front of him?"

"His ears did turn a very interesting shade of red," Teyla remembered.

"Almost be too easy, though," Jennifer said.

They reached the top of the waterfall to find that the land opened out all of a sudden. The stream curved away sharply to the west of them, flowing through a large clearing in the woods. Nearest to the water, the ground was all flat slabs of lichen-covered stone, but between the stone and the trees was a meadow filled with a tangle of wild flowers—mostly rich blues and deep reds, but here and there Jennifer could see flowers that were a spiky, bright yellow, and tall ones like hollyhocks that were a deep, imperial purple. After spending so much of the past few days surrounded by muted colours—the faded purples and greys of the hive ship, the green-grey of the foliage in most of the rest of the forest, the charcoal grey stone of the strange town—the sight of the flowers came as a welcome shock to the senses. "It's beautiful," Jennifer murmured.

"Yes," Teyla agreed. Looking at the flowers was apparently enough to smooth away some of the lines of tension from around her eyes and mouth—she looked much more herself. "And I think here is where we leave the stream—see?" She pulled the map back out from her backpack and folded it open to the relevant section. It did indeed seem as if here was where they should leave the stream, presuming that they would be able to travel from this point to the Stargate as the crow flies. They were at least two thirds of the way there, Jennifer estimated, which was something of a boost—they might make it to the gate before nightfall.

"And when we get there," Teyla said firmly, "we shall gate to some world which we know to be uninhabited yet safe. You shall wait there, while I return to Atlantis and gather the equipment and supplies needed in order to carry out a removal of the tracking device in the field."

Jennifer gaped a little at her. It was such a simple solution—why hadn't Jennifer, with her medical degrees and her supposedly functioning brain, thought of it before now?

Teyla must have read what Jennifer was thinking. She smiled. "It is hard to think of all the possibilities when you are upset," she said. "I confess that I did not immediately think of it myself, though now it seems very self-evident."

Unexpected hope made a grin spread across Jennifer's face; she could feel her cheeks ache with it. "That's—yes." It wouldn't be easy to operate in the field, especially not on something this complicated, but Jennifer supposed that she had had the damned device inserted in less than antiseptic conditions. She was sure she'd make it through this round. Atlantis' medics and surgeons were handpicked, some of the very best in their respective fields, and if anyone could help her, they could. They were also far more likely to dose her stupid with morphine beforehand.

Teyla resettled the backpack on her back and said, with a great deal of evident satisfaction in her voice, "It will be good to be home."

"Amen to that," Jennifer said—but they had barely taken five steps across the meadow when she realised that, true to form, what she had seen hadn't been light at the end of the tunnel but an oncoming train. The sky overhead was still a clear, cloudless blue, but it was beginning to echo with the distant sound of a dart's engine—a high-pitched whine that made a cold sweat prickle at Jennifer's scalp and another wave of fear subsume whatever measure of hope she'd allowed herself. "Shit. They're sending _more_ of them?"

Teyla was standing stock-still, looking away up at the sky to the south and east of them. Jennifer couldn't see any sign of the dart just yet, but perhaps Teyla could. After a moment, her head jerked a little and Teyla said, "It is a single dart this time, but I am sure it will try to head us off at the gate. Can you run?"

"I'll have to," Jennifer said grimly, and they took off, plunging back into the trees again—the only noises around them their breathing, and the crashing of their feet through the undergrowth, and the steadily growing sound of the dart overhead.

*********

It was not easy to keep an eye on where she was running—the oversized tree roots were mostly easy to avoid, but the tangle of vegetation on the ground hid a multitude of pitfalls—and also to keep one eye on the sky, to gauge their direction from the sun despite the fact that it was mostly hidden from view by broadly spreading branches. Teyla had little choice, however. The dart, she could sense, had circled over their heads once or twice before flying back to set down in the clearing through which she and Jennifer had just passed. They had a head start on the Wraith, but not much, and even if they were able to sustain their current pace over a long period, the gate was not in immediate reach.

"Why now?" Jennifer said, panting, as they cleared a fallen, dry-barked sapling and started down a gentle slope that was still quite densely wooded. "Why couldn't they wait another couple of hours to send one after us? Couldn't we have that much of a break?"

Teyla set her jaw. It disturbed her that she could fathom so much of how the Wraith thought—that a small part of her genetic make-up, coupled with so many years spent battling the Wraith, interfacing with their technology and even once, horrendously, pretending to be one of them, meant that she knew what they were doing. "It's deliberate," she said, between breaths. "They will have been tracking you, no doubt—waited until we got close to the gate and then sent a new hunter. It makes the game more fun for them." The Wraith were like a cat playing with a _peeka_ with a broken leg—the _peeka_ could still scuttle back and forth just enough to provide entertainment for the cat, but with a bat of its paw, the cat could stop it from getting away until the _peeka_ eventually died from exhaustion and pain, or the cat decided to end it.

"Oh, that's just disturbing," Jennifer said, voice harsh with exertion.

Neither of them spoke for a little while after that, too preoccupied with covering as much ground as possible, yet eventually they began to flag. Neither Teyla nor Jennifer were unfit, but nor did they possess Ronon's almost superhuman ability to run for miles without seeming to wilt. Teyla's lungs ached and her legs throbbed; when they finally slowed down to something closer to a jog, Jennifer was gulping in such great breaths that Teyla was half-afraid she would make herself sick.

"How much further?" Jennifer asked her when she could speak again, though her voice was hoarse.

Teyla shook her head. "It is hard to say." At a fast walking pace, she had thought there would be perhaps an hour and a half's journey between the stream bank and the Stargate, as they reckoned time on Atlantis. It would be less than that now, but she could not easily estimate by how much. "It cannot be more than four or five miles away."

Jennifer reached into Teyla's backpack and dug out one of the water bottles. She took a hasty gulp or two from it before wiping the mouth of it on her t-shirt—given the state of both of their clothing, Teyla appreciated it more as a gesture than as a worthwhile action—and handed it over to Teyla. "What can we do?" she asked while Teyla drank. "There's no way we can outrun a Wraith over a distance of five miles, and if it manages to get around us and block us from getting to the gate, we're screwed."

Teyla considered for a moment. Their options were few and their resources limited—some sidearms, a knife, the contents of her backpack. Yet they still did have themselves—and put together, she thought, Teyla Emmagan and Jennifer Keller were something. "How would you feel," she asked Jennifer, "about setting an ambush?"

Jennifer stared at her for a moment, wide-eyed, and then let out a breath so heavy that she blew away the strands of hair from around her face. "Well," she replied, "first time for everything. Where do you want me?"

*********

Jennifer tried not to feel too much like a sitting duck, but standing here on an exposed tree root, waiting for a Wraith to come find her, it was hard to feel like anything else. Teyla had assured her that the Wraith was indeed approaching, but the woods around her seemed empty and still. Standing there waiting to be attacked when to all intents and purposes it was a beautiful, calm day in the woods made her feel not just like a sitting duck, but also like a ninny.

She took a deep breath, trying to control the surge of adrenaline in her veins—not least because if she didn't, Jennifer was pretty sure she ran a good chance of burning out her adrenal gland before she made it off this planet. "Here, Mr Wraith," she said under her breath, scanning the southern woods from left to right, trying to catch any glimpse of pale flesh and dark leather. "Come on, Mr Wraith, here I am—come and get me. I'm just a defenceless little human female. Maybe I'm injured; easy pickings!" She wondered if she could feign a broken arm or leg in a way that would entice the Wraith to come closer quicker, but she dismissed the thought—either the Wraith wouldn't be able to parse the human indicators for pain and distress, or he would realise something was up from the way she was behaving. It was risky enough that Teyla was planning to entice him closer with thin tendrils of thought, with an awareness of where she was, without Jennifer messing things up. She had to admit that there was a reason why she hadn't taken up acting as a career—the same reason that Mrs Jorgensen had always ended up rolling her eyes and casting Jennifer as the back half of the second camel in the First Lutheran nativity play.

It felt like she stood there for an age, though realistically she knew it couldn't have been that long. She shifted from foot to foot, staring so intently at the horizon where it vanished into trees and undergrowth that she felt as if she'd sprained a muscle in her eyes, and thus was so startled to finally see the Wraith approach that she squeaked quietly and had to stop herself from falling backwards off the tree. She was there as bait, she reminded herself sternly, not to get herself killed in an embarrassing way.

The Wraith snarled when he saw her, a menace of sharp, greying teeth that Jennifer could see even from a couple of hundred yards away. She felt terrified, but she forced her leg muscles to lock into place—she had to hold her ground and get him close enough. "That's right," she said under her breath, as he came closer to her. "Just keep coming closer, nice and easy, that's right, you bastard."

He walked towards her, long legs eating up the distance easily, his fingers flexing as if in greedy anticipation of feeding on her. When he got close enough, he raised the stunner he carried in his left hand. Jennifer braced herself, readying for the prickling, painful pins and needles sensation that she knew came with being shot by a Wraith stunner—but just as he fired, a shot rang out, shockingly loud in the still forest. Teyla had not missed her mark. The Wraith jerked and his shot went wild, the blue-white beam of energy rippling around the trunk of the tree to Jennifer's right.

Still, Teyla's shot hadn't quite been true. She'd clipped the Wraith in the shoulder, instead of shooting him clearly through his forehead—though Jennifer had to admit that it was a true act of marksmanship to be able to hit him at all from a distance while lying on a branch far up in a tree—and so he was more startled than seriously injured. His surprise, though, gave Jennifer enough time to dive down and snatch the gun which she had wedged into a hollow in the roots of the tree. She came up on one knee and trained her gun on the Wraith as quickly as she could. He had turned to try to spot Teyla, but the dense foliage camouflaged her well.

The Wraith aimed a shot from his stunner in what must have been roughly Teyla's first position, but she had already jumped to another of the tree's broad branches. His shot merely splintered bark and sent leaves flying, but Teyla returned fire and hit him in the belly. The Wraith reeled from the impact, body jerking to the side, which gave Jennifer an ideal opening. She exhaled and pulled the trigger, feeling the recoil of the gun through her shoulder while she watched blood bloom dark and sticky on the Wraith's forehead.

Another shot from Teyla's gun and the Wraith was on his knees; Jennifer put another shot into the back of his head for good measure. He crumpled slowly, then lay unmoving, though Jennifer gave herself until at least a count of ten before she would believe that he was really dead. She clambered down carefully from her perch on the root. Once on the ground, she looked up to see that Teyla was already shimmying down the tree, both guns shoved into her backpack and her copper-gold hair glinting in the afternoon sunshine.

"That was nicely done," she told Jennifer when she reached the ground. She had a satisfied look on her face, and her mouth curled up a little at the corners when she nudged the Wraith's body with the toe of her boot. The Wraith didn't move.

"I make a pretty good worm on a hook," Jennifer said cheerfully, tightening her ponytail. It felt like each of her nerves were still individually lit up, fizzing with excitement and anticipation and adrenaline, with all the echoes of her fear, and her hands trembled a little as she retied the elastic on her hair. She'd killed a Wraith.

Teyla arched an eyebrow at her, a look on her face that was at once fond and frustrated. "I meant that shot you took."

"Oh." Jennifer flushed. "Well, I think we were both pretty badass."

Teyla's smile broadened into a grin, and her laughter was a wonderful sound to hear in that place. "I shall be sure to describe us as such when I write up my report for Mr Woolsey."

"Totally what he wants to read," Jennifer said. She picked her gun back up from where it lay resting against her leg. "Shall we?"

"I believe we shall," Teyla said.

*********

The rest of the walk to the Stargate was uneventful. Not long after they left the Wraith's body behind them, they came across a roadway leading through the woods. It was made of the same slate grey stone as the city had been, though it did not make Teyla's skin crawl just to look at it. She believed it predated that settlement—the stones were worn down more at the middle than they were at the edges, the kind of wear that required the passage of feet over a very many years, and grasses and wildflowers had forced themselves up here and there between the stones. It seemed a far more natural fading—as if the feet that had walked here once had been truly human.

Neither of them were quite sanguine enough about it to actually walk _on_ it, of course; they traded rather sheepish looks about it, but by mutual, unspoken assent, walked alongside the road rather than stepping onto the stones. The road led up a hill, one which was at times so steep that they both had to use their hands to grab for purchase on the ground. Teyla thought it was an odd route for a road to take, though she realised why when they finally cleared the top. It was not actually a hill, but more of a broad plateau. Mostly bare of the trees which covered so much else of this planet, the ground was covered with scrub grass and heathers—and, right in the centre of the plateau, set on a wide dais, was the Stargate.

Jennifer stood and stared at it for a moment. "I have never wanted to hug an inanimate piece of machinery so much before," she said fervently.

Teyla might not have expressed herself in exactly the same way, but she did agree with the sentiment. There was something very cheering about the sight of the Stargate—it had so often before signalled the end of a stressful mission and a safe return to Atlantis, or merely the conclusion of a successful trading trip which would bring her home to Athos. Right now it meant safety, and an end to pain for Jennifer. Teyla noticed with amusement that they both walked faster across the plateau, as if they had jointly agreed that spending a minute longer than absolutely necessary on this planet was to be avoided.

A quick inspection of the DHD did not reveal any problems with the device which were detectable to Teyla. Despite its probable age, the crystals were all in place and did not show any hairline fractures. She ran through the one or two basic tests which Rodney required that all gate team members learn before going off world if they did not wish to be, quote, "reduced to pieces so tiny that I would not be able to find you if I had the use of an electron microscope, a crack CSI team _and_ Horatio Caine standing around removing and replacing his glasses at will, understand?"

"It should be safe to dial out," Teyla said, replacing the panel at the base of the DHD and standing back up. Her knees ached simply from kneeling on the ground, and she was all too aware that beneath the excitement at the thought of being able to leave this place—of returning to her son and her team and her home; of being able to save Jennifer from feeling the weight of a Wraith's palm against her chest—she was bruised and bone weary. If she were to be selfish, she would also admit that the thoughts of a hot bath, a mug of scalding hot stout tea with a dash of spirits and a warm bed were extremely enticing. But first: Jennifer, and safety. "Though it will be no easy matter to persuade Atlantis to lower the gate shield when we are without our IDCs."

Jennifer chewed on her lower lip. "Maybe you should head to the Alpha Site?" she suggested. "It's visited pretty regularly, and you might—"

"I could, but we do not know the address of this planet," Teyla pointed out. "If I went to the Alpha or Beta Site, I would have to do so alone; otherwise we run the risk of drawing the Wraith's attention to them. But if I were to leave you behind, I would not know what address to return to, and—"

"—and in the time it would take to get you through to Atlantis and back again, they could have sent a hundred more Wraith," Jennifer said glumly. She sat down cross-legged on a nearby patch of heather, the most comfortable seat available when surrounded by so much rocky soil.

"Indeed. I think we should both travel to a planet with which we are familiar, but which does not have a population which would be put in danger by our presence."

"Aldigat?"

Teyla shook her head. "A mining operation has since been established there. The population is small, but it is a permanent one." She thought for a long moment, then, "Llenam?"

"The one with all those dry canals?" Jennifer asked.

Teyla nodded. The exploratory mission which she and her team had undertaken there had been noteworthy primarily for how thoroughly uneventful it had been. Persistent drought had caused Llenam's inhabitants to leave, not a culling; there were no large predators or other natural threats; and the buildings they left behind had contained no Ancient technology, no dangerous secrets. The worst injury sustained was a splinter in Rodney's palm. "It has long been abandoned, and we saw nothing dangerous on our exploratory mission there. Certainly nothing which would make the others immediately reject any contact from there as a ploy."

"Sounds good to me," Jennifer said, "but that still hasn't solved the problem of what we can do without an IDC."

Teyla cast around her, looking for any inspiration she could get from wind or clouds, blue-green grass or— "Jennifer, John has spoken to me before about a signalling system your people use. Communication in rhythmic beats?" Teyla could not remember the name of it off the top of her head, but she could tap out against her leg the sequence which John had told her meant _help_ in the code—three short, three long, three short.

"Morse code?" Jennifer said.

"That's it! Do you know it?"

"A little," Jennifer said. "I had a couple of… well, pretty miserable years in the Brownies—we had to learn Morse Code in case, I don't know, we ended up shipwrecked on a desert island in the middle of Wisconsin. Why?"

"Do you think you can remember enough to spell out my name? And perhaps that of Llenam." Teyla stooped and picked up a handful of good-sized stones from the ground. "When in the gate room, it is possible to hear the sound of any impacts against the shield. If we are able to hit the shield just right with these stones—"

"That'd be a pretty long shot," Jennifer said. "They'd have to understand what they're hearing, and know the code."

Teyla quirked an eyebrow. "Do you have a better idea?"

"Not a one," Jennifer cheerfully admitted. "I'm willing to try if you are."

They gated through to Llenam, casting nervous glances over their shoulders as they went through the Stargate in case a Wraith would appear and follow them. On the other side, Llenam was quiet and peaceful, but the stillness in the air there did not set Teyla's teeth on edge as it had on the previous planet. "Oh, thank god," Jennifer said, appearing to feel the same way. She sank down onto the low, white stone wall which ran in a circle around the gate, shoulders rounded with evident exhaustion, and watched while Teyla practiced her throwing technique—using larger stones to create the thudding impact needed for a 'dash', as Jennifer called it, pebbles to create a 'dot.' She would have to be precise, and quite quick—there was no telling how the gate technicians might respond to such an unscheduled dial in. Then, with a little cairn of pebbles and stones beside her, she waited as Jennifer dialled in the address for Atlantis. The wormhole roared into life like a great wave breaking on the shore and then collapsed back to form a pool of blue. Teyla took a breath, and then took aim and sent her message through—a staccato rendition of her name as it was most commonly rendered in the principal Earth alphabet, T-E-Y-L-A, followed by L-L-E-N-A-M.

They had no way of knowing if the message had gone through; indeed, they could not even hear if the stones had made any audible impact against the shield. There was a pause of several heartbeats after she had sent the last stone skimming through the event horizon, and then the gate shut down.

"Well," Jennifer said into the silence, "that seemed anti-climactic. Now what?"

"Now we wait," Teyla said, digging her nails into the palms of her hands.

*********

Jennifer wanted them to dial back right away, but no matter how much she stared at the gate and wished for its glyphs to light up with an incoming connection, or how much she fidgeted, it remained stubbornly dark. Intellectually, she knew that even if Atlantis had received and understood Teyla's message, they wouldn't dial back right away—that Colonel Sheppard and Rodney and Ronon were no doubt in the middle of berating Woolsey for not wanting to charge straight into things, while Zelenka and Lorne argued for caution and an analysis of the readings from the gate. Still. "This is incredibly frustrating."

"Mmm," Teyla said distantly. She had taken a seat beside Jennifer on the low wall, and the expression on her face was so impossibly calm and mild that Jennifer knew it had to be a front—she'd only seen that kind of stillness on Teyla's face once before, and that had been right before she'd hauled off and punched that asshole guard on Esicnom. It was the kind of stillness that was its own variety of potential energy, an energy that was all too eager to be transformed into kinetic action. "I do not disagree with you."

Silence stretched out between them again, and Jennifer tried and failed to make her fingers stop fidgeting, tried and failed not to think about how close they were to home, and how unutterably far. About how she still had something in her back which could call a hive ship into orbit over their heads; how at any moment they could look up and see a sky swarming with approaching darts; how many things she'd never had the courage to do before. "Teyla—" Jennifer began, feeling lit up and restless and more than a little reckless, because this could all go very wrong, but she realised that if she didn't say this now, if she didn't act when she was still here and present, she might never get another chance.

"Yes?" Teyla turned to look at her, so close that Jennifer could feel Teyla's breath warm against her cheek. The pale light of the Llenami morning limned Teyla from behind, gilding the already rich brown of her skin; against the white marble, Teyla's hair was a riot of copper and old gold, and Jennifer couldn't help herself. She leaned in, registering the way Teyla's eyes went wide and her lips parted a little, and pressed her mouth to Teyla's. Her lips were dry and warm and chapped, and the feel of them against Jennifer's own made Jennifer's breath come in hiccups. The kiss was soft and brief, and when Jennifer pulled away, Teyla looked more than a little stunned.

"Jennifer…" Teyla said slowly, and Jennifer got a horrible sinking feeling in her stomach, because she could guess what was probably coming next. Where had reckless ever got her? Five year plans, carefully worked out statistics, the probabilities of possibilities, those were what she should stick to relying on—not on the dim and distant hope that she could ever get the girl. "What—"

Jennifer was saved from any further embarrassment when they heard the distinctive sound of the gate powering up. The wormhole flared into life and for a long moment, they both stared at the blue horizon, waiting for someone to walk through. Some_thing_ came through all right, and then the gate winked out. They both blinked at it for a moment, and then Teyla stood up and walked over to where the object had landed. When she picked it up, Jennifer realised that it was an orange Nerf ball—one of the dozens that floated around Atlantis to be used for impromptu games of touch football or to be squeezed for stress relief, as the situation required—with a piece of paper wrapped around it and secured with an elastic band.

Teyla unfolded it and stood blinking at it for a moment. Jennifer got up to join her, and read on the paper Colonel Sheppard's familiar, spiky scrawl: _Hey T—Just starting to miss you. Come on home. Beer's in the cooler_.

Jennifer could have laughed—from how very John Sheppard that message was; from sheer relief—and it appeared Teyla felt the same way. Her eyes crinkled up at the corners with happiness, and she nodded quickly when Jennifer offered to dial the gate.

The wormhole opened up to Atlantis once more and both of them stared at it for a moment. Despite their mutual happiness, there was still an awkward tension between them, and Jennifer knew she should probably say something to alleviate it—something to tell Teyla that that had just been an adrenaline-and-stress-induced reaction, that she knew it was a horrible mistake and she would never do it again. "Well… say hi to the folks back home for me." She winced as soon as the words were out of the mouth; really, that probably wasn't going to do the trick.

"I—yes," Teyla said. For a moment, Jennifer thought she would say something else. Teyla looked at her with a steady and curiously searching gaze, but then she shook her head almost imperceptibly, walked through the wormhole and was gone.

"Well. Okay," Jennifer said. She stood staring after the wormhole for a minute, and then at the empty gate, and then she sat back down on the wall, nursing her sidearm and keeping an anxious eye on the sky, hoping not to see any more Wraith darts. That had probably gone about as well as could be expected.

*********

After the humid, sap-saturated air of the first planet, and the spice-rich scent of Llenam, it was a great relief to take her first breath on Atlantis and taste the salt-and-metal tang of the city on her tongue. Teyla felt some of the tension leach out of her shoulders in the split second before her team descended on her. From the corner of her eye, she could see that Marines ringed the gate room, weapons at the ready in case her message really had been a ruse, but apparently none of her men were overly inclined to caution right now. Ronon's laughter was like a tonic, and he lifted her up and twirled her around so that her feet left the ground and Teyla's face was pressed against the warm, broad expanse of his chest, but despite how good it felt, she pulled herself free and did not return John's greeting, or answer Rodney's babble of _oh my god, you're okay! Are you okay?_

"Jennifer," she said urgently. "She needs a medical team right away."

John turned and jerked his head, signalling for the waiting medical team to come forward. They scurried up towards the gate—Teyla saw a harried-looking Marie, and Doctors Singh and Jónsdóttir amongst them, bringing with them several bags of supplies and a gurney—while Rodney, blanching, peppered her with questions about Jennifer.

"She is alive," Teyla hurried to reassure him, and tried not to let mention of Jennifer's welfare remind Teyla of what it had felt like when Jennifer had kissed her. It was important that she focus on the here and now. "And waiting at the gate on the other side, but she is injured. She will need medical help before she can come back to Atlantis."

Rodney yelled up at Amelia to redial Llenam at once. Up on the balcony, Teyla saw, half of the expedition seemed to have gathered to watch—Mr Woolsey, his hands clasped behind his back; Major Lorne and Sergeant Mehra and Captain Cadman.

"What happened?" John said. His jaw was clenched tight, the same way that it always got when one of his people was injured, and he was clipping his P90 to the sling beneath his vest.

Teyla did not know how she could possibly summarise all that had happened to them over the past few days. There was simply too much, and for a brief moment, Teyla felt the hot prickling of self-indulgent tears at the corners of her eyes. She forced them back. "The Wraith," she settled on saying, "they made us Run. Jennifer has a tracking device in her back. I could not remove it."

She had rarely seen Ronon look so angry and so stricken; he turned and was gone through the gate before Teyla had time to say anything else. "That's probably not a good idea, buddy," John yelled after him, but it was too late. "Aww, hell," John said, and signalling for several Marines to accompany him, he followed Ronon through the wormhole.

"Typical," Rodney huffed, but he, it seemed, had similarly come prepared for all eventualities, and snapped his fingers at Dr Zelenka, who was standing off to one side. "The bag, and the one with the blue thing, and the one with the experimental stuff—no, not that one, _that_ one, what, have I developed some kind of unexpected speech impediment? Am I speaking in tongues?" He turned to look at Teyla, and his eyes gained that focus which meant he had stopped thinking in scientific abstractions and was giving all his attention to her for a moment. "Well," he said, "are you coming?"

"Of course," Teyla said, and in the space of a few steps found herself back on Llenam. Where there had been silence and vigil before, however, now all was bustling activity. Jennifer was still seated on the wall, but Marie and Dr Singh were kneeling behind her, conferring about what was to be done with her back while Jennifer told them about how the tracker had been implanted and offered her own suggestions drawn from her studies of Wraith medical technology. Ronon was standing next to her, glaring at all and sundry, glowering at the sky, as if daring a Wraith to appear and try and hurt another member of his family on his watch. He held in a knife in one hand and was twirling it restlessly around and between his fingers. John and the Marines had scattered out, ringing the part of the town where the Stargate stood with P90s at the ready, while Rodney knelt down and scattered bits of Ancient technology and a laptop and a screwdriver or two around him. From what he was snapping at Dr Zelenka, he appeared to be constructing some kind of makeshift scanner.

"This is ridiculous," Rodney was muttering to himself as he fitted two pieces together with practised ease, "being expected to do work this delicate in conditions like this," but he was already rising and hurrying over to show Dr Singh what he had concocted.

Teyla stood there, and felt a little useless, a little unable to contribute after so many days spent relying so wholly on the capabilities of herself and Jennifer. It was nice, not to have to take the burden of survival so much on their shoulders alone, and yet it was also a little… well, to own the truth it was frustrating. Especially when her eyes kept wandering over to Jennifer—the hunch of her shoulders as she sat there, clearly trying to pretend that she wasn't sitting on a wall with her shirt off in front of the expedition's ranking military officer, her ex-boyfriend and what felt like half of the expedition. Teyla watched her, the tangled curls of her hair and the pale blue cotton of her bra and the sweet curve of her mouth; and most of all, met Jennifer's gaze, which was a little uncertain but curiously steady. Teyla did not know why it made her shiver, and yet it did; nor did she know why she felt so nervous about moving closer to Jennifer, so clumsy when it came to offering Jennifer some words of comfort.

Everything which Teyla wanted to say seemed inappropriate in such a situation—when her own surprise, her own sense of confusion and her desire to parse out what had changed between herself and Jennifer, were far less important than Jennifer's dignity and her comfort. True, Jennifer did not seem to feel any embarrassment for her actions; not, Teyla realised, that she would want her to do so. Teyla had not expected the kiss, but when she examined her own reactions to it, she was quite certain that she was not daunted by the possibilities that it presented. It was only that Teyla did not yet know what she herself wanted, and so she settled for platitudes and the comfort of knowing that Jennifer's whole family was around her.

Rodney and Dr Zelenka between them came up with a solution after a half hour or so, jury-rigging a device which dampened the subspace signal emanating from the tracker at the same time that it shorted out the electromagnetic impulses which were helping it fuse with Jennifer's skeleton. The Wraith would not be able to run them to ground now. Teyla stayed to watch as the medics administered a local anaesthetic powerful enough to make Jennifer's eyes droop, and then gently laid her prone on the gurney before they cut open the ugly black stitches and began to remove the central bulk of the tracking device.

The sight of it made Teyla feel unsettled and ill at ease, so much so that she was curt with John when he drifted close and asked her some commonplace question. That was enough to make John's eyebrows skitter towards his hairline and drawl, "Somebody needs a nap. You can go back to Atlantis, you know. We've got this." His words were nonchalant, but the fine lines around his eyes grew deeper with concern.

"Yes," Teyla said, dragging her gaze away from the line of Jennifer's back, pale and vulnerable, streaked yellow with iodine and red with blood. "Perhaps you are right."

She still waited, however, until the main part of tracker device had been deposited into a specimen tray. Dr Singh, not looking up from his task of packing the wound with gauze, said, "We've got the bulk of it, but she'll have to go straight into the O.R. on Atlantis to remove the rest of it. It's damaged both scapulae, and she's bleeding more than I like." The looks of fierce concentration on his face, and on those of the other medical personnel, were both a comfort and a worry—Teyla knew that they were all highly capable, experts in their field, but if they were worried, then she was doubly so. She felt very grateful for the sensation of Ronon standing warm and strong behind her, the gentle touch of his hand on her shoulder.

Teyla followed the gurney back through the gate to the city, then stood in the gateroom for a moment and watched as the medics hurried away with it in the direction of the infirmary. She felt exhausted down to the bone, but she made herself walk to her quarters, shower and throw away the clothes she'd been wearing for the past few days. Clean at last and no longer stinking of fear and pain, she then went to Kanaan's quarters and collected Torren. Kanaan was glad to see her return safely, but Torren squealed in pure delight on seeing her, clinging to her with fists that were still toddler chubby, and said _Mama, mama_ in a way that made her heart ache. Teyla pressed kisses to his curls and the sweet-milk-smelling skin of his forehead as she walked to the mess, and drank three glasses of orange juice and ate a whole chicken pot pie, before going to give Mr Woolsey a preliminary debriefing. He looked a little taken aback when she walked into his office, sat down, and began to tell him about the probable tactical strength of the hive ship which had kidnapped them and about the strange pseudo-Atlantis, all while Torren sat on her lap and played with her hair, still shower-damp. Teyla just arched an eyebrow at him. Mr Woolsey was, at least, a man smart enough to pass no comment.

Not long after she sat down in Woolsey's office, she heard the sound of John and Rodney's voices, raised and echoing in the gate room. There was concern and vitality in their tones, and for the first time it was driven home to her that she was back where she belonged, with all the support of her family around her. Teyla closed her eyes for a moment, and then, stiffening her spine and tightening her grip around Torren, continued to tell Mr Woolsey about the possible alliances of the Wraith Queen in question. She was home, and this was the duty she owed to her home: the recognition that there was work to be done.

*********

Painkillers were great, painkillers were wonderful, and Jennifer spent most of the next while in a happy haze of them. She was dimly aware of Marie giving her updates on her progress every time she changed the dressing on her back, and Jennifer cheerfully agreed with all of them—just as she'd nodded and beamed when Satinder told her that they were inserting IVs to combat the infection in her back and to help rehydrate her; that they were dressing her feet because she had several nasty blisters there which looked like they could become infected if she wasn't careful; that they would need to operate again because scans showed some more remaining shards of the alloy that the Wraith had used to weld the tracker to the bone. "That," Jennifer told him, carefully enunciating her words, "is _awesome_," and then fell into the deep, dreamless sleep of anaesthesia. She woke up feeling groggy, starving, deeply unhappy that the chart beside the bed said they were beginning to take the lovely, lovely painkillers away from her, and not a little startled to find Ronon sitting in a chair near her, staring intently at her.

"Hey," she said a little weakly, feeling as if some kind of small, furry creature had crawled into her mouth and died. She struggled to sit upright against the pillows, wincing at the sharp discomfort she could feel even through the painkillers, relenting when Ronon stood up and arranged them for her, smoothing the blankets around her legs once more before he sat back down. "Um. Thanks?"

Ronon shrugged in that way he always did when he was casually, carefully kind; the way that said _think nothing of it_.

"Have you been here long?"

Ronon shrugged again. "Rodney left at sun-up. Something about some simulations he had to run."

Jennifer looked at the readout of the monitor beside her bed. It was almost noon. "Oh." Another thought occurred to her. "Have _I_ been here long?"

"Eleven days. Docs were pretty worried about the complications, but they think you're over the worst of it now."

"Complications?" Jennifer felt her eyes widen, and she reached out a hand for the chart which hung at the foot of her bed. Ronon handed it to her, and left her to exclaim quietly over the difficult, painstaking work the others had done to ensure that she would eventually make a full recovery, with little more than the need for a session or two with one of the Ancient bone regeneration devices. While she read, Ronon stood and reached outside of the privacy curtains, reappearing with a portable table, a tray laden down with food sitting on top of it. Jennifer's stomach grumbled at the sight of it—she didn't think she'd ever been so glad to see the mess hall's rendition of lo mein before. He let her take three or four mouthfuls, washed down with large gulps of water, before he said, "Teyla told us what happened. You did good."

She blinked at him, confused, before realising that he couldn't possibly be referring to the fact that she'd kissed Teyla. "Oh. Well, I don't think I could have gotten out of that city if it wasn't for Teyla's help."

He cocked an eyebrow at her, looking almost amused in that way that meant she'd said something silly again and didn't know what, and for just a moment, looking weary. "They made you a Runner. Takes strength of will to face that and survive, not just strength of body. You did good." Sometimes Jennifer forgot that Ronon—dear, funny Ronon with his fondness for sharp things, his terrible jokes that made her laugh every time, his penchant for learning bits of Shakespeare off by heart and reciting them at unexpected times just to make Amelia smile—had spent seven years without any thought of rescue or comfort. It was easy for it to slip her mind every now and then because his time as Runner had given him anger at the Wraith, and determination and drive, but they hadn't taken his hope away. They hadn't made him hard.

"Oh," Jennifer said intelligently. "Well. That's. Thank you."

"You're welcome," Ronon said, face lit up with a quick, mischievous grin. "Though I bet that training helped, too. Gonna organise another round of training on the mainland for next week. You should come."

"Oh god," Jennifer groaned, and hit him on the knee. It was true that she wouldn't have done half as well as she did on that planet without Ronon's patient instruction, but the last time she'd gone on one of his 'easy training exercises' she'd been picking bits of dried mud out of all sorts of places for the next month. "I think I'll pass."

"Okay," Ronon said with another grin, and stood to leave. "You should get some sleep." Before he went, though, he stooped to press a kiss to her forehead. "Glad you're back," was all he said; and then the curtains fell closed and Jennifer closed her eyes and swallowed around the sudden, unexpected lump in her throat.

*********

Teyla had not intentionally avoided Jennifer. There had been much to do on her return—part of it occasioned by her capture, part of it the inevitable result of three days or so of work left unattended in her absence—which Teyla had had to fit in around sleep, time with Torren, sending a message of greeting to the Naiburatu (who were now recovering from the attempted culling), and a check up with Marie, who had insisted that Teyla's cuts and scrapes needed disinfecting and bandaging. Yet she could not deny that she had not visited Jennifer when she was still recovering in the infirmary, nor when she had experienced a setback and Dr Singh had had to operate again; nor could she deny that that was not because she did not have hopes, but perhaps because past experiences had taught her not to hope too much. In fact, she thought, as she sat down to breakfast in the mess hall several days after their return and stirred sugar into her coffee, she was reacting remarkably as John might in a similar situation. Teyla sighed heavily. That was not a good sign.

She drained her cup in three large mouthfuls, and was just putting everything back on her tray and preparing to leave the mess hall when Rodney sat down opposite her. His own tray was laden down with enough food for three people—sausage and bacon, fluffy scrambled eggs and toast, pancake and porridge, a glass of apple juice and a mug of coffee as big as his head—and he looked both remarkably cheerful and a little manic, in that way he got when he had not slept in a while. "Hey," he said, "hey, you're not going so soon, right? I've got stuff to tell you."

Teyla suppressed a sigh and subsided back into her seat. When Rodney had something on his mind, there was little chance that she would be able to dissuade him from telling her all about it. "How can I help you, Rodney?"

He shook his head. "No no, it's more about how I can help _you_," he said, pointing at her with a piece of pancake speared on his fork. "I've been taking a look at the bits of tech you brought back from that awful planet." Rodney rummaged in the pockets of his BDUs, produced one of the items Teyla had scavenged from the tower in that other city, and slapped it down on the table between them. Teyla tried her best not to flinch back from such an innocuous thing.

"It's like a, um, a holographic Dictaphone, I suppose that's the best comparison—a machine you can use to record your own voice, to take notes as a log, or to play back later," he clarified when Teyla looked blankly at him. "It's a little damaged—I'm not sure yet if the actual storage crystal, or just the power supply—but I've managed to get bits of the most recent recording out of the buffer."

"A recording?" Teyla said slowly. She reached out hesitantly to pick up the recording device, letting it rest in the palm of her hand. It felt cool and curiously heavy for something so small; now that she had time to examine it, as she had not had back on the forested planet, she could see that the surface of it was covered with an intricate tracery of geometric lines. It was almost beautiful.

Rodney's head bobbed up and down in agreement while he worked on swallowing his mouthful of porridge. "Mmpfh fhpm," he said, and tapped some hidden spot on the side of the cube. There was a low humming noise and then a small hologram appeared in mid-air directly over the cube.

It was a fuzzy image, grainy with age and damage, but Teyla was pretty certain that the man speaking to her was the same man whose corpse they had found back in the tower. Here he was alive and scared, but more than scared he was _angry_. Teyla had to strain to hear what he was saying, his voice made tinny and distorted by the damage to the device, but she could make out some of the fragmented sentences that the cube was spitting out, over and over again: _were wrong to trust him… not what we thought when we agreed to follow… such rage that I've never… cannot hold out much longer… the corruption of our city, with machines and traps that kill and maim_ and then, most terrifying of all, _he's burnt them, he's burnt them and pulled them into the stone._

Teyla dropped the cube as if its cool metal had suddenly become hot enough to burn. It clattered to the table and the hologram winked out. "Pulled them into the stone?" She thought of the carvings on the walls in the city, the wide-stretched mouths and anguished eyes, and all the explanations which occurred to her now filled her with such unreasoning horror that she wanted to scream. The thoughts of having walked amidst such pain, all unknowing, shamed her.

"Yeah," Rodney shook his head and took a sip of his coffee. "I have no idea what that means. It could be a corruption of the file, but maybe if I can pull out more of the recording, I can—"

"Thank you, Rodney," Teyla said, standing. The scrape of her chair's legs against the ground drowned out what he was saying. "That has been very helpful." She walked quickly out of the mess hall, fully aware that Rodney was staring at her curiously, and that when Rodney's curiosity was aroused, so soon would John and Ronon's be. Yet she needed time alone to think, time to absorb the extent of what that static-broken recording implied; she needed time to absorb the fact that her first thought had been to tell Jennifer of her reaction, to tell her that she had been reminded that there were some things in life that you should not wait for, not when anything could happen.

*********

One of the perks of being CMO was that Jennifer could release herself to her quarters on her own recognisance when she judged herself to be sufficiently healed, and earn no more than the grumbling of Marie and an eye roll from Dr Jónsdóttir for it. "Rest! If you pull your stitches," Marie said, "you're to call me, straight away. And take your pain meds!"

"Yes, mom," Jennifer called over her shoulder, "I'll be fine!" In fact, she fully intended to catch up on some of her paperwork, or weed out the email inbox that was sure to be overflowing after five days' absence; but despite having spent most of the past day or so sleeping, the trip back to her quarters took so much out of her that her pillows looked incredibly inviting almost as soon as she walked in the door.

"A mid-morning nap is probably fine," she rationalised to herself. She kicked off her sneakers and lay down on top of the covers in just her t-shirt and sweatpants. She would just close her eyes for a moment; but when she opened them again, the light in the room had changed to the warm, slanting light of early afternoon and her door was chiming repeatedly. Jennifer sat up and swiped a hand over the panel beside the bed that let someone in. The door opened to reveal Teyla; there was a look of panic on her face which began to fade only slowly at the sight of Jennifer.

"I am sorry," Teyla said. She lowered her hand from where she had clearly been about to pull the crystal from the door and try to open it manually. "I—I did not mean to wake you. It is just that you did not answer, and I thought…"

Jennifer cleared her throat and stood up. She felt incredibly nervous, fingers twitching with it, and she was trying very, very hard not to think about the fact that the last time she'd spoken with Teyla, it had been in the aftermath of kissing her. "It's okay. Um. Do you want to come in?"

"Thank you," Teyla said. She stepped in and the door closed behind her, leaving them alone and in silence. Jennifer thought that Teyla looked not at all like she'd been running for her life through an alien forest not so long ago—she looked calm and composed, hair hanging in shining locks down her back, wearing one of those lace-up tops she was so fond of with one of the ankle-length split skirts she usually wore to practice _bantos_ in. Jennifer, wearing a ratty old t-shirt that proclaimed _Johns Hopkins Softball League_ in peeling letters, her hair wild and tangled from sleep, felt awkward and lumpen in comparison.

"Um. So," she said, casting around for some way to gracefully say _thanks for repeatedly saving my life back there, I appreciate it_ and _sorry for kissing you like that, it's just that I have this horrible, huge crush on you_ and _if you could not tell anyone about it, that would be awesome_. "You look nice. _Well_, you look well," and really, Jennifer thought desperately, why couldn't the floor open up beneath your feet when you were actually wishing for it to?

Teyla's mouth twitched, and for a horrible moment, Jennifer thought that she was going to _laugh_ at her. But then Teyla said, "I wished to speak to you about…about…," and then she stopped and her expression changed all of a sudden, almost crumpling, and she said, "I have not been able to stop thinking about—_Jennifer_," her voice low and hot and urgent. Jennifer blinked, astonished, because this was not at all how she'd been expecting this to go—Teyla looking at her as if she needed some comfort, some reassurance, fine lines of pain and fear around her mouth—but then Teyla took a step towards her and Jennifer met her halfway.

This time when Jennifer kissed her, Teyla kissed back, and it felt so good that Jennifer couldn't stop the little moan that escaped from her throat. Teyla's hair was unbelievably soft beneath the palms of Jennifer's hands, and the things she was doing with her tongue made Jennifer feel weak at the knees. Arousal sparked low and hot in Jennifer's belly, and she pressed closer until Teyla's arms came up around her waist and they were pressed together, breast to hip. "Do—do you want—" Jennifer began, and was astounded by the timbre of her own voice, low and throaty.

"We shall talk later," Teyla said calmly, far too calmly, and then did something astonishing with her teeth and Jennifer's throat.

"Okay," Jennifer said weakly, and busied herself with unlacing Teyla's top.

Teyla made the most intoxicating noises in the back of her throat when Jennifer stroked the smooth curves of her breast; close kin to the ones Jennifer made when Teyla pushed her hands beneath her t-shirt and Jennifer felt cool, callused fingertips skim over her belly. Slowly, still kissing, they moved over to the bed, and Teyla lay down on her back, allowing Jennifer to lie on top of her, still mindful of her stitches. They kissed for a long time, trading low gasps and careful touches. Jennifer learned that Teyla arched up into her mouth when she licked at her breasts; Jennifer discovered that she, herself, apparently had a thing for Teyla nipping sharply at her lower lip before sucking on it to soothe away the ache. For a long time, Jennifer was content to let arousal build like that, slow and heady, and then all of a sudden it was far too slow.

She sat back on her heels and pulled off her t-shirt, wincing a little when that tugged at her stitches, then began to push her sweatpants down over her hips. It all got a little complicated when Teyla sat up and began to suckle Jennifer's nipples to hard points through the thin fabric of her bra, first the left, then the right.

"Not helping," Jennifer gasped.

"I did not know," Teyla said, grinning wickedly as she removed Jennifer's bra, "that you required _help_." Then she did _something_ with her hips and flipped them over so that Jennifer was lying on her belly with Teyla straddling her. Teyla bent over and pressed a very gentle kiss between Jennifer's shoulder blade, right on top of the bandage. Jennifer shivered, and pressed her hot face into the pillow as Teyla worked her way down, trailing soft kisses along Jennifer's spine as she worked Jennifer's sweatpants and her underwear down and threw them onto the floor.

Teyla kissed her hips, and the small of her back, and down her thighs, and the backs of her knees, and even her calves. Her hands stroked Jennifer's sides, and the outside of her thighs, and even between them, though never touching where Jennifer ached for it most. Teyla's kisses tickled Jennifer, and made her tremble, and eventually she had to roll onto her back—pain be damned—and say, "Teyla, seriously, foreplay is great and all, but—"

She didn't get a chance to say much more than that. Teyla was on top of her, the soft skin of her breasts and belly and the cool, slippery leathers of her skirt pressing down against Jennifer, and Jennifer kissed her for long moments before urging her up so that Jennifer could lick and suck at Teyla's breasts. Teyla, it seemed, was very sensitive there; when Jennifer stroked her hand up Teyla's thigh and in through the slit of her skirt, she found that Teyla was already incredibly wet.

"Oh god," Jennifer said, "that is just… very…", her words trailing off because she didn't think adjectives would be much use here. She stroked her until Teyla was shuddering and pushing down against the heel of her hand. At this angle, Jennifer couldn't move much, but it was apparently enough—Teyla came, shuddering, head thrown back and fresh sweat standing out on her skin and Jennifer's name on her lips. Jennifer gentled her through it, and then lay back and watched as Teyla unlaced her skirt with unusually clumsy fingers. The skirt came off and away and then Jennifer was looking up at a very naked Teyla Emmagan, a figure which had been the subject of quite a few dreams of Jennifer's, and maybe even one or two illicit day dreams.

"That," Teyla said, making a show of considering, face alight with—not amusement, Jennifer realised—contentment, "was quite good for a first time."

"Well," Jennifer said, fingers stroking along Teyla's side, down her arms, "practice _does_ make perfect."

"I was hoping you might say that," Teyla said, and then she was pressing Jennifer back against the pillows and her thigh was pressing in between Jennifer's and she arched up against it, crying out against Teyla's mouth—and, well, she stopped thinking for a little while.

*********

It was shading into evening by the time Teyla woke up. Her muscles ached pleasantly, her mouth was dry, and as she indulged herself in a long, thorough stretch before getting up in search of water. Sex with Jennifer had been more than pleasurable; somewhere around her third orgasm, Teyla had discovered exactly what Jennifer could do with her tongue, and she had never been so glad before that the quarters on Atlantis were so well soundproofed. It had made her feel good, had banished for a time the thoughts of what may have happened in the places where they had walked; and though Teyla knew she would have to tell Jennifer what Rodney had discovered, she felt better fortified for the task now, now that she knew there was comfort for them to be had together.

She had not planned to sleep with Jennifer—at least, she had certainly not planned to sleep with her so _soon_—and had come to Jennifer's quarters only with the intention of speaking to her about what Rodney had uncovered and discussing what they should do next. She had come because she felt she owed it to both of them to be honest. But it was as if the sight of Jennifer, standing there barefoot, had flicked a switch inside Teyla. She had felt so distressed, so uncertain, on the walk over to Jennifer's quarters, knowing that she needed some kind of relief and hoping that conversation with Jennifer would be able to provide it. Instead she had found that somewhere over the past few months, Jennifer had come to mean affection and support to Teyla, an association which their time together on that planet had only solidified; somewhere between the moment Jennifer had kissed her and now, Teyla had decided that the possibility of them was worth saying yes to; and the sight of Jennifer, uncertain but not giving up ground, meant that Teyla had not been able to think of anything but kissing her in return.

She drained a full glass and filled another to take back to bed with her. Jennifer was awake when she padded back; she took the glass from Teyla gratefully and drained it along with a couple of pain pills. "Are you very sore?" Teyla asked her, running one hand lightly down Jennifer's arm before setting the now empty glass down on the bedside table.

Jennifer shook her head, not quite meeting Teyla's eyes. "Satinder and Allison did good work. There'll be a little bit of scarring, of course, from—from what came before. But I'll be fine. It should heal neatly."

Teyla leaned across and pressed a kiss to Jennifer's forehead. "We will both be well," she said. She took a deep breath. "But there is still now to deal with; and I can listen, if you wish to talk about it."

Jennifer looked up at her quizzically, and for all that she normally looked much younger than her years, now she looked quite a bit older. "It's not that much different than before," she said. "Hive seed implanted in my belly, tracking device in my back—what's the big difference?" She was aiming for nonchalance, but her voice cracked in the middle.

"Many things, and none," Teyla said. She coaxed Jennifer to lie back down beside her, tugging the blankets up over them; Jennifer had not asked her to leave, and Teyla was not inclined to do so. She hesitated for a moment before speaking, because this was not a topic she wished to visit often, even within the privacy of her own head—but it was an awful, comforting wonder to know that all those close to her in Atlantis knew what it was like to have something alien living beneath your skin, changing who you were and who you could be. And the others were not here right now, but Jennifer had followed her across two planets, and so Teyla cleared her throat and said, "When Carson first told me the truth about my… heritage, for a long time afterwards I expected my hands to betray me."

Jennifer shifted against her. "Your hands?"

"Yes." Teyla held them up—slim and brown and callused, capable of so many good things. "I had so many nightmares where my touch hurt people, and when I looked down at my hands, there was a mouth where the crease of my palm should be." Speaking about it brought back memories of those nights, when Teyla would wake up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, inspecting her palms and her cheeks for the least sign that she was not who she had always felt herself to be. "It was not pleasant." An understatement.

"I'm sorry," Jennifer said softly.

Teyla shook her head. "It is past. I now know that there is part of me which will always be different, and I cannot pretend that I am always sanguine about it, but…" She found Jennifer's hand and laced their fingers together, palms pressed close; there was such a comfort in touch. "I try not to be afraid of myself any more."

Jennifer let out a breath. "That's a pretty good resolution," she said, after a moment's pause. "I'm just… I'm not really sure who I am anymore."

Teyla turned her head and kissed her, soft and slow until Jennifer's eyes fluttered closed and her hand had come up to trace patterns into the sensitive skin over Teyla's collarbone. "I like who you are," Teyla told her, feeling suddenly and unexpectedly shy, as if she were telling some great secret, rather than something which, she now realised, had becoming more and more the truth over the past weeks and months. She did not yet know what the true depths of her feelings for Jennifer were; did not yet know how much of this heady feeling was a relic from what they had been through together, how much the product of good sex after several month's abstinence. And yet she found herself more than willing to find out. "All of you."

She was pressed so close to her that she could feel the blush that suffused Jennifer's skin at that, a high colour that heated her skin suddenly and thoroughly. "I like you, too," Jennifer murmured against Teyla's mouth, and than she was shimmying down the bed, underneath the blankets, and Teyla felt the touch of Jennifer's lips on her belly, and lower, and she grinned up at the ceiling and went with it.

*********

Afterwards, Teyla showered and dressed. Jennifer lay in bed and watched her, feeling drowsy and content and warm, then kissed her goodbye before Teyla slipped out to check on Torren, feed him, and put him down to sleep with Kanaan for the night. While she was gone, Jennifer must have dozed for a while; she didn't remember it getting dark, but it was full night outside by the time Teyla slipped back into the room.

"All okay?" Jennifer asked, shifting over to make room as Teyla sat down on the edge of the bed. She felt a little muzzy, but had to admit that even compared to how she'd felt that afternoon, her back hurt her so much less. Endorphins were amazing things; she stretched her legs, pointing her toes just to feel the pleasant ache in her muscles. It was always nice to luxuriate a little in the afterglow of good sex.

Teyla cocked her head to one side, a smile playing around her mouth. "Oh, Torren decided that he most certainly did _not_ want to eat his dinner, because wearing it as a hat was much more enjoyable. Which is, as far as my son is concerned, quite a regular occurrence."

Jennifer had been around Torren at meal times before; she was quite aware of that fact. "Ronon," she mumbled, "bad influence."

Teyla rolled her eyes. "John, in this instance. I believe I shall have to introduce a pasta ban."

"Mightn't be such a bad idea." Jennifer cleared her throat, feeling stupidly nervous. "So. Um. Do you want to stay over tonight?"

Teyla's eyes crinkled up at the corners in an appallingly attractive way when she smiled. "I would like that very much," she said, and Jennifer's stomach flipped over in a way that confirmed what she already knew: her heart was in a whole lot of trouble. "But…" She paused as if she were looking for the right words to say, and that made Jennifer sit up, because this was _Teyla_—Teyla always seemed to have the right words.

"What is it?"

"Rodney," she said, "has discovered something about one of the artefacts we brought back with us." She opened her fist and showed Jennifer a small, familiar cube made of silvery metal. "I have something to show you."

"Okay," Jennifer said, feeling wary and curious all at once, struggling to sit upright against the pillows as Teyla switched on the cube. A staticky image of a man appeared, floating an inch or two over the surface of the cube, and when the man said _help_, Jennifer had a weird flashback to being eight years old and watching Princess Leia plead for Obi Wan's help for the first time. She peered at the figure. "Is that—is that the guy from the tower?" The clothes and the hair were the same, but it was difficult to reconcile the mummified face with the one Jennifer saw here, animated with fear and concern.

"I believe so," Teyla said quietly.

The recording was damaged, and mostly looped through the same fragments, over and over, but occasionally it spat out something new: _were wrong to trust him… not what we thought when we agreed to follow him_ and _he promised that he would make us like the Ancestors but when we realised what… such rage that I've never… cannot hold out much longer_. Jennifer shifted a little closer to Teyla, feeling chilled despite the warm blankets heaped on top of her. _He's turned the city against us; there are traps and nothing will grow, every green thing seems to die and if you… such rage that I've never… if he truly is an Ancestor, then he's… the heat is so intense that I can't… I'm trying to hold out against him as long as I can, but the door will not stand against him for much—_ The man in the recording turned his head, looking at something that would forever be outside of Jennifer's field of vision. _I'm sorry_, he said, _Tell my family that I tried, I—_ and then there was nothing but static. Teyla gently closed her fingers around the cube.

Jennifer looked at her in horror. "That whole city—it was one big trap all along?"

"Or an experiment," Teyla said, mouth twisting. "Or both."

"Why?" Jennifer felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach, winded, as she thought back over what had happened to them in that city—all the fear, all the panic of it was overlaid with a new level of horror as she realised that that city hadn't been empty at all. "Why would anyone want to do that?"

Teyla carefully placed the cube on the low shelf beside the bed. There was an expression on her face of such bleakness that Jennifer didn't think she'd ever seen its match on Teyla's face before. "I do not know; perhaps I do not wish to know. Yet I believe we must find out."

"Maybe," Jennifer said, and she stayed watching the cube until sleep finally weighed down her eyelids once more and she dozed off again. Her sleep was fitful, and when she dreamed, it was of faces: Teyla's and her own, the mummified man's and the hundred of carved faces. All of their mouths were moving, all of them were saying something, but Jennifer could never quite make out what that was.

*********

 There was something soothing about watching the sun come up over the ocean around Atlantis. It struck silver and gold sparks from the waves and turned the city beneath them to a salt-water glory, and Teyla looked out at it from the mess hall window, feeling almost meditative as she looked at it, her hands wrapped around a warm cup of stout tea.

Jennifer, sitting opposite her, was working her way through a very large bowl of oatmeal topped with brown sugar. When she'd brought it over to the table, she'd mumbled something about needing the extra energy to refuel; _that_ had made Teyla arch an eyebrow and smirk, which made Jennifer turn bright red and stammer, which had in turn caused Teyla to rub her foot against Jennifer's under the table. It was all very pleasurable; having been without a partner for so long after the end of her relationship with Kanaan, Teyla had forgotten a little how good the frisson of extended foreplay could be.

The others joined them about halfway through the meal—Ronon and John, fresh from their morning run, were sweaty and grinning and in possession of about twenty pieces of French toast apiece; Rodney, trailing after them, had his laptop in one hand and a travel mug of what smelled like dark roast coffee in the other and was grumbling something inaudibly under his breath.

"Morning," Ronon said as he sat down, before spearing a large piece of toast on his fork and popping it into his mouth.

"How'd you guys sleep?" John asked as he very carefully poured out the syrup so that it covered each and every part of his French toast. It was apparently an operation which required much effort; his tongue peeked out at the corner of his mouth.

"Very well, thank you," Teyla said calmly, and very pointedly did not smirk when Ronon looked from her to Jennifer and back again with a questioning look on his face. He slowly raised both eyebrows at them; in another life, Teyla thought, Ronon might well have become one of Sateda's best diplomats. He had a true skill for reading people. Jennifer turned bright red, John and Rodney looked oblivious, and Teyla had to hide her smile behind her cup of tea.

"So," John said around a mouthful of food. "Rodney showed me the thing. Hologram."

Across the table, Teyla could see Jennifer stiffen a little. They had both agreed last night that something would have to be done about the city, but both had envisioned having to persuade others of the necessity of doing something; Teyla had not thought that the men would raise the subject of their own accord. Teyla straightened up in her seat. "Yes?"

Rodney looked up from the lengthy email he was composing on his laptop, which even from a distance Teyla could see contained many exclamation marks. "I managed to retrieve more of the recording from the storage crystals last night." He shifted a little in his seat, clearly uncomfortable. "It's not—well, suffice to say that it makes a really good cautionary tale for why Ancients shouldn't go rogue. That whole city was designed by him to… it's not… When they tried to stand up to him, he—This guy was crazy. He was power hungry, and he didn't like it when people defied him. I'm not entirely sure of the mechanics of it yet, but it's like this Ancient was able to trap an echo of those people in the stone." He looked over at John, uneasy. "Like when the whales were trying to warn us about the solar flares, but stronger. To an extent, they're alive again inside the walls, just—it's not really life. They're looping through their final moments over and over."

"What Rodney is _trying_ to say," John said, sounding a little aggravated as he licked syrup from his lips and pointedly not looking anyone in the eye, "is that we should kill it with fire."

Ronon's mouth tightened into an unamused smile. "Or lasers."

John pointed his fork at him. "Lasers are also totally acceptable, buddy."

"This is the ideal opportunity to test that space laser they've just installed on the _Daedalus_." On Rodney's face, horror at his discovery warred with lust for ever bigger explosions.

"I think if it's really part of those people trapped inside it," Jennifer said suddenly, firmly, looking down at her bowl of oatmeal, "then it should be whatever way is quickest." Her jaw was tight, her fist firmly clenched around her spoon, and Teyla understood exactly how she felt.

"Sounds fine by me," John said, in that nonchalant tone he always seemed to acquire when someone close to him was upset.

Ronon bumped Jennifer lightly on the shoulder with his fist. "Awesome," he said, coaxing a smile from her. "Gonna go get my guns. Sheppard?"

"Meet you in the armoury," John said around his last mouthful of French toast.

"If you could both shower before we go," Rodney sniped as he stood up and pushed his chair in, "that would be _wonderful_. Jumper 10 still smells of feet after last time."

The sound of the men bickering at one another faded away as they left the mess hall. Soon Jennifer and Teyla were surrounded only by the usual sounds of the city waking up—the clink of coffee mugs, the scrape of spoon against bowl, the rising and falling hum of conversation. Jennifer pushed her bowl away from her and looked up at Teyla.

"You know," she said conversationally, "if we were smart, we'd let them go back to that god-awful planet and finish things off by themselves."

"That is true," Teyla agreed.

"Though," Jennifer said, standing up and stacking their plates and cups back on her tray, "if we were _really_ smart, given their collective track record, we wouldn't be letting them go anywhere near it."

"Also quite correct," Teyla said amiably.

"Meet you in the gate room in twenty?" Jennifer said.

"Let us say thirty minutes," Teyla said, kissing her on the cheek as they parted at the entrance to the mess hall, "I must tell Kanaan that I most likely will not be able to take Torren this afternoon."

"See you then," Jennifer said and headed off down the hall. Teyla walked off to her own quarters, thinking of the full day's work that lay ahead of her—the good and the difficult, all of it to be faced with her family around her, with well-beloved people standing strong beside her—and she did not wonder at the smile on her face or the hope in her heart. Her life had changed so much since the night when strangers had come to the door of her tent, in good ways and in bad—it was hard to imagine her undertaking such a mission several years ago, or to imagine the need for it. Yet here circumstances had led her, and Teyla thought she was able for it—able and ready and waiting.

*********

It was maybe a little over thirty minutes by the time they were all gathered together in the gate room. Checking in with the infirmary, getting permission from Mr Woolsey for the CMO to go off-world while injured, and shrugging on a tac vest without full mobility all took a little longer than Jennifer had estimated. By the time Jennifer hurried out of the armoury, Teyla was waiting in the gate room with her team and half a dozen Marines; most of them were waiting patiently, but Ronon and Colonel Sheppard looked like they were playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who would be allowed to set off C4 first. Jennifer tried not to let that make her feel too nervous; they were both fully trained in using that sort of thing, right? And if they did get a little carried away, well, Teyla's good sense and Rodney's highly-developed sense of self preservation should be enough to reel them in.

Probably.

"You are ready?" Teyla asked her.

"As I'll ever be," Jennifer told her, excitement and anxiety, trepidation and happiness, warring within her and making her stomach flip over as she watched the Stargate engage. She felt the tips of Teyla's fingertips brush gently against the back of her hand, and had to fight back a giddy, nervous smile. The wormhole flared bright blue, and Jennifer thought that maybe she wouldn't ever be one of those people who thrived on stuff like this, but if she could be a help—well, she wanted to be there.

"You know," she said to Teyla, as they waited for the Marines to move out through the Stargate, "I was thinking. If—when—we get this done, that Wraith Queen is still out there." Maybe Jennifer wouldn't ever be the kind of person who led the charge, but she could _help_.

"Funnily enough," Teyla said, her smile slow and deliberate and brilliant, leaving Jennifer kind of breathless, "I was thinking something quite similar."

"You ladies ready?" Colonel Sheppard asked, slipping on a pair of sunglasses. "The mess is serving meat loaf this evening; Rodney wants to be back before it's all gone."

_Your ready wit slays me_ Rodney said, at the same time that Teyla said, _I believe we are_, at the same time that Jennifer said, _Yes_ and believed it herself; and this time, when Teyla and Jennifer vanished out of the world, they were walking side by side, together.

* * *

  


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**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [no way out but through](https://archiveofourown.org/works/119418) by [mapsandlegends](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mapsandlegends/pseuds/mapsandlegends)




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